Entrancing entrances: Hotel lobbies in Las Vegas have wide appeal

Thursday, June 28, 2001 | 8:19 a.m.

Strolling into the lobby at the Paris Las Vegas hotel recently, Lisa Flair and Lori Scardina, both from Louisiana, stopped to survey the ostentatious splendor of the sparkling room inspired by the Palace of Versailles.

"This is the prettiest lobby I've ever seen," Scardina said. "This is just very regal, very elegant." While they said they both appreciate the grand lobbies of Mandalay Bay and Bellagio, "La Reception" at Paris Las Vegas is by far their favorite in town.

And they've seen a few. Stopping at lobbies was part of their sightseeing agenda during their recent visit to Las Vegas.

"We're going from lobby to lobby just to check it out," Flair said.

Twenty years ago would Strip hotel lobbies have been part of their trip?

"It didn't even enter my mind," said Scardina, who visited Las Vegas years prior. "We were strictly here to gamble."

But Las Vegas has changed. And along with excessively European- themed resorts came the evolution of the hotel lobbies, which in many ways have become destinations themselves.

At Bellagio, "Fiori di Como," the colorful hand-blown glass sculpture by artist Dale Chihuly, covers 2,000 square feet of the lobby ceiling, and lures in tourists for photographic opportunities.

At Mirage, people stroll purposefully to the registration desk near the hotel's entrance to get an up-close, free view of the sharks and tropical fish swimming in the 20,000-gallon, 53-foot-long aquarium behind the registration desk.

"Years ago (lobbies) were very utilitarian," Alan Feldman, spokesman for MGM MIRAGE, said. "It was hard to tell where the lobby ended and the casino began or where the casino ended and the lobby began. In many of the hotels it was a registration desk on one end of the casino."

But today "the lobby is the signature of the hotel," Feldman said.

And architects and designers are paying careful attention to their centerpieces, said longtime interior designer Charles Silverman of Yates-Silverman Inc. The firm designed the interiors of Paris Las Vegas, New York-New York and Luxor.

"Competition has forced one hotel to outdo another," Silverman said. "A lobby gives the architect and designer the chance to do that -- to showcase that work."

Besides, he explained, "We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create Paris. Why not take it one step further?"

A grand reception

As local architect and president of the American Institute of Architects Las Vegas Chapter David Frommer says, "The lobby is a grand arcade.

"It architecturally reinforces the point of the hotel," Frommer said. "You go to the casino space, but it's kind of a large room to hold slot machines."

At Paris Las Vegas, the ornate white lobby -- decorated with sparkling hand-laid mosaic tiles imported from Italy, Austrian crystal chandeliers and replica paintings of old-world masterpieces -- is designed to give guests the full impression of a Parisian lobby.

"People are actually walking into a lobby of a grand Parisian hotel from a Paris street," Silverman said.

"The casino is lit as if it were late afternoon (outdoors) in Paris," he said, explaining that the brightness of the lobby, and the fact that it is a self-contained unit, helps to further the impression."

At New York-New York, the art-deco registration desk is adjacent to the casino. It simulates the busyness of a city, further enhancing the hotel's theme and creating excitement for its guests who are checking in, Silverman said.

Creating excitement in the new genre of Las Vegas resort lobbies is all part of the design, said Attila Lawrence, professor and coordinator of the Interior Architecture Program at UNLV.

"The majority of Las Vegas hotel lobbies are intended to engage and stimulate the visitors' interest to further explore the properties' gaming, entertainment and culinary offerings," Lawrence said.

"Las Vegas lobbies thrive on carefully orchestrated visual energies that engage the guests' psychic energies and motivate them to seek and explore connections and experiences with other areas of the properties."

In the Mandalay Bay lobby on a recent morning, exploring is exactly what tourists were doing. Inquisitive folks strolled from one element to the next, quietly stopping to meditate on the different architectural designs, as if walking through a gallery of fine art.

The spacious, ornamental lobby that is billed on travel websites as tropically themed with "mystic and exotic architecture" features a 14-foot-tall tropical fish aquarium encased in a four-tiered, pyramid-style stone structure underneath a skylight that offers a view of the towering hotel.

Tropical scenes, complete with waterfalls, adorn the walls behind the registration desk, and exotic birds that perform twice daily in the lobby are otherwise on display in cages.

While one end of the lobby leads to the porte cochere (the car valet area), the other looks out from a vast picture window onto mystical sculptures and the lush 11-acre water area behind them.

The European-themed decorative marble and granite flooring leads guests into a softly lit promenade that passes shops and galleries before ultimately spilling into the casino.

Most Las Vegas hotel lobbies are near the gaming area, said John Wald, project manager for the local Klai-Juba Architects, which designed Mandalay Bay among other Strip properties. "Here we definitely wanted a separation between the casino and resort."

Volume and aesthetics

Ample space provides a "resort feel" while handling the volume of tourists checking into and out of the hotel, Wald said.

This is the case at many of the new megaresorts.

"Nowhere else in the country do hotels have 3,000 rooms," said Terry Dougall, president of the California interior and theme design firm Dougall Design & Association, Inc., which designed the interiors of the Monte Carlo and Mandalay Bay lobbies.

"Many of the hotels have 3,000 rooms now, including the Monte Carlo," Dougall said. "You have 3,000 people potentially checking out between the hours of 8 (a.m.) and 12 (p.m.) and checking in at 12 (p.m.).

"Can you be a grand hotel without having a grand lobby? No." Dougall said. "The lobbies (at Mandalay Bay and Monte Carlo) are pretty, they lend to a certain sense of drama and grandeur."

And in Las Vegas, where the more recently built resorts adhere strongly to a theme, "(Lobbies) are sort of like the first paragraph of a novel," Dougall said.

The interior of Monte Carlo, is inspired by the Belle Epoque period of Europe, and is showcased by its decor in the hotel lobby.

While some refer to the florid design of the Belle Epoque, a short period surrounding the turn of the 20th century, as "wedding-cake architecture," (because of its over-the-top elegance) we call it the World's Fair architecture," Dougall said.

"It's the most beautiful period in architecture, the most grand buildings," he said. "All of the great hotels were built in this period. They were the grandames of great hotels. We were trying to recreate a great, grandame old hotel."

League of its own

When architect Carol Berens wrote "Hotel Bars and Lobbies" (McGraw-Hill, 1997), a look into the social role of the urban hotel lobby, she purposely did not include the lobbies of Las Vegas hotels.

In most urban areas, hotel lobbies serve as public living rooms, providing a social setting where people can meet and be on display, Beren said recently by telephone from New York.

"They're stage sets for whatever you want to live out. Each hotel tells a different story ... from old-world elegance to young and hip. It's a fantasy, but it's you playing that role," Berens said. "If you were to walk into Hudson (hotel) in New York you would have to stand a certain way, be a certain way.

"In Las Vegas, (the lobby) is more of a passive experience," Berens said. "In Las Vegas the hotel lobby is a stage set for itself."

And for lobby hoppers and other sightseers on the Strip, the more ornate the lobby, the more grand the overall impression of the hotel.

For Scardina, "The lobby is the first impression of the hotel. The initial appearance makes it or breaks it."

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