Fontainebleau Las Vegas

For fourteen years the blue glass shell at 2777 South Las Vegas Boulevard was the tallest unfinished building in America. Fontainebleau Las Vegas opened on 13 December 2023 at 737 feet and 67 storeys, the tallest occupiable building in Nevada, with 3,644 rooms, 36 restaurants and bars and 550,000 square feet of convention space on the north end of the Strip.

History

Jeffrey Soffer's Fontainebleau Resorts broke ground in 2007 on the site of the old El Rancho and Algiers, intending a Las Vegas sibling for the 1954 Fontainebleau Miami Beach by Morris Lapidus. The tower was roughly 70 per cent complete when the financing collapsed in 2009 and the company filed for bankruptcy. Carl Icahn bought the carcass in 2010 and sat on it. Witkoff and New Valley bought it in 2017, renamed it The Drew, and stalled again in 2020. In 2021 Soffer's Fontainebleau Development, with Koch Real Estate Investments, took it back, finished the interiors in two years and opened under the original name.

Architecture and design

Carlos Zapata designed the tower, a slightly curved slab of blue glass that reads differently as the sun moves; Bergman Walls and Associates were the architects of record. The interiors carry the Lapidus bow tie, the motif from the Miami Beach lobby floor, across carpets, screens and ceilings. The palette is blue and gold with pale stone, and the public rooms are tall for Las Vegas, with the Bleau Bar under a lit canopy at the centre of the casino floor. Art is placed rather than hung: large commissioned pieces stand in the lobby and along the convention promenade.

Rooms and suites

The 3,644 rooms and suites occupy the tower above the podium, with floor-to-ceiling glass over the Strip, the Sphere or the mountains; the north-Strip position gives the upper floors a long view down the boulevard. Fleur de Lis is the private suite tier with its own entrance and lounge. Bathrooms are marble with separate tubs in most categories.

Dining

The restaurant list was assembled from other cities' successes. Mother Wolf, Evan Funke's Roman trattoria from Los Angeles, Komodo and Papi Steak from Miami, KYU, and Don's Prime, a steakhouse created for the resort, anchor the dining promenade, with Chyna Club, Ito and Washing Potato among the Asian rooms. Cafes, a bakery and a food hall cover the daytime. The Bleau Bar in the centre of the floor is the meeting point.

Wellness

Lapis Spa and Wellness, 55,000 square feet on the pool level, has treatment rooms, hydrotherapy and a large fitness club. The pool deck has six pools with cabanas and a club space, LIV Beach, that runs as a dayclub.

Weddings and events

The convention centre is the largest piece of the resort after the hotel: 550,000 square feet of ballrooms, meeting rooms and pre-function space, built for the trade shows across the street at the Las Vegas Convention Center's West Hall. BleauLive Theater seats 3,800 for concerts and residencies. Weddings use the ballrooms and the pool terraces, and LIV nightclub takes the after-party.

Location

The resort is at the north end of the Strip, beside Resorts World and opposite the Convention Center's West Hall, about a mile north of Wynn Las Vegas. Harry Reid International Airport is 15 to 20 minutes by car. There is no rail link; the Las Vegas Monorail's Convention Center station is the nearest stop. Among luxury hotels in Las Vegas it is the newest of the full-scale resorts and the only one to have waited this long for its opening night.