Bellagio

Bellagio stands on the west side of the Las Vegas Strip behind a lake of eight acres, where fountains rise and sway to music every half hour from the afternoon until midnight. It opened on 15 October 1998 as the most expensive hotel ever built at the time, at about 1.6 billion dollars, and it set the standard for the grand luxury hotel in Las Vegas that followed: fine art, celebrated chefs, a resident Cirque du Soleil show and conference floors on the scale of a city.

History

Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts built Bellagio on the site of the Dunes, imploded in 1993, and named it after the village on Lake Como that inspired the lakeside setting. The opening night of 1998 was led by a performance of O, the water show by Cirque du Soleil created for the hotel's theatre, which has played there from that night on. The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art opened with works from Wynn's own collection, an unusual idea for the Strip at the time. MGM Grand acquired Mirage Resorts in 2000, and the hotel has been operated by MGM Resorts International since. The Spa Tower added a second tower of rooms in 2004. In 2019 the real estate was sold to Blackstone, with MGM Resorts remaining the operator under a long lease. The casino and the fountains were the setting of the 2001 film Ocean's Eleven.

Architecture and design

The design is by Jon Jerde and the Jerde Partnership, with DeRuyter Butler as executive architect for Wynn's design team. The main tower, 36 storeys in cream and terracotta, curves along the lake like a lakeside palazzo. The Fountains of Bellagio, engineered by WET Design, use more than a thousand nozzles and lights across the lake and have become the most viewed free spectacle in the city. Inside, the lobby ceiling is Fiori di Como by Dale Chihuly, about 2,000 hand-blown glass flowers covering some 2,000 square feet. Beyond it, the Conservatory and Botanical Gardens change their planted display five times a year, for the seasons and Chinese New Year, with a team of horticulturists working overnight to install each one.

Rooms and suites

Bellagio has 3,933 rooms and suites in the main tower and the Spa Tower. Rooms facing the Strip look over the lake and the fountains; those at the back face the pool courtyards and the mountains. The suites on the upper floors range from one-bedroom suites to the penthouses and the villas, which have their own gardens and are reserved for the hotel's most important guests.

Dining

The restaurants include Picasso, where Julian Serrano has cooked since 1998 in a dining room hung with original works by the painter, overlooking the lake; Le Cirque, the Las Vegas outpost of the Maccioni family's New York restaurant; and a row of other dining rooms, cafés and bars around the Conservatory. Several tables and terraces face the fountains.

Wellness

The Spa & Salon occupies two floors of the Spa Tower with treatment rooms, steam, sauna and a fitness centre. The pool courtyard, laid out as Mediterranean gardens with five pools, cabanas and citrus trees, is open in season. Shadow Creek, the golf course built by Steve Wynn for the Mirage in North Las Vegas, is available to guests of the hotel.

Weddings and events

Bellagio has about 200,000 square feet of meeting and convention space, with the Grand Ballroom and the Tower Ballroom as the largest rooms, both divisible, and dozens of smaller meeting rooms and boardrooms. The Bellagio Wedding Chapels, with their own entrance, hold ceremonies for a handful of guests up to about 130, and receptions follow in the ballrooms, the private dining rooms or the terraces over the lake. Corporate groups use the hotel for product launches, incentives and board meetings during the convention seasons.

Location

The hotel is at 3600 South Las Vegas Boulevard, at the corner of Flamingo Road, in the centre of the Strip. Caesars Palace is across Flamingo Road, The Cosmopolitan and ARIA adjoin to the south, and a tram connects Bellagio to CityCenter and Park MGM. Harry Reid International Airport is some 6 kilometres off, a 15-minute taxi ride.