On a clear December afternoon, Roger Thomas was completing a four-month renovation of the high-limit slot-machine room at the Wynn Las Vegas resort. Three assistants trailed him as he darted around, scrutinizing details and shouting instructions. “We’ve got an hour until the ropes come down,” he yelled. “And we need more fluff now. We need it desperately.” The “fluff” consisted of ivy that he was using to hide the roots of a pair of giant agave plants. The agaves framed a fountain, designed by Thomas, at the center of which was a colossal lotus flower, made of eighteen gold-painted panels and illuminated by pink lights. The lotus motif was inspired by a Japanese sculpture of the Buddha that Thomas remembered seeing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Thomas, who is the head of design at Wynn Resorts, Steve Wynn’s gambling and hotel company, had done the original design for the room only a few years before. He had been told to create a space for older male gamblers, and so he had used overstuffed leather armchairs, heavy curtains, and dark mahogany panelling. “It was all very clubby,” he said. “A place for bourbon, testosterone, and cigars.” But the Wynn Casino Operations department monitors the returns of every gambling device in the casino, and the room’s yields were falling short. After some investigation, it became clear that the problem was a demographic one. Men weren’t playing these games; women were.
So Thomas redesigned the room. He created a wall of windows to flood the slot machines with natural light. He threw out the old furniture, replacing it with a palette that he called “garden conservatory”—lime green, white leather, and gold. “I wanted it bright and shimmery and full of flowers,” Thomas told me. “A place where a lady might feel comfortable.” Now every available surface appears to be covered in something expensive. There are Italian marbles and carpets designed by Thomas. Bowls of floating orchids are set on tables; stone mosaics frame the walkway; the ceiling is a quilt of gold mirrors. Thomas even bought a collection of antique lotus-flower sculptures, which he placed near a row of blinking video-poker slots. “These gambling machines are basically big light fixtures—they scream for attention—and so you normally design around them,” he said. “But I wanted this room to be the opposite of every other slot room.”
Doing the opposite of what is usual has become Thomas’s trademark. Beginning with the Bellagio hotel, fourteen years ago, he has reinvented the look of the modern gambling hall by deliberately violating every previously accepted rule of casino design. Since then, his interiors have been at the heart of Steve Wynn’s spreading empire, in hotels like the Wynn Las Vegas and the Wynn Macau. In a world of corporate hotels slouching toward similarity, Thomas’s designs flaunt their uniqueness and, if anything, are getting quirkier from year to year. His sketches for a Wynn development (still to be approved) in Foxborough, Massachusetts, mix a basic vacation-lodge vocabulary of fireplaces and wooden beams with a passion for eighteenth-century France, cream drapery, and red parasols. “I don’t do focus groups,” Thomas told me. “I create rooms that I want to be in.”
Steve Wynn’s Vegas hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, five-star approach to a desert city previously known for cheap buffets and strip clubs. But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself, creating spaces that allow people to enjoy the act of losing money, thus encouraging them to lose even more. Wynn is not a modest man, but his praise for Thomas is unequivocal. “Trying to separate Roger from whatever credit I’ve received in my lifetime is ridiculous,” he once said. “Roger’s taste level and his creativity are sixty per cent of the success we’ve had.”
The received wisdom of modern casino design was codified by a former gambling addict named Bill Friedman. In the nineteen-sixties, Friedman was nearly ruined by his weakness for craps, baccarat, and blackjack. But after years of huge losses he had a realization: “I saw that either I could have a life or I could gamble, but I couldn’t do both.” Friedman became a professor of his addiction, teaching the first course in casino management at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Later, as a casino executive, he managed the Castaways Hotel and the Silver Slipper. Both hotels had low occupancy rates and empty gaming halls when he took over. “I wanted to understand why no one was coming to our places,” he told me. After all, every hotel on the Strip offered the same games at the same odds. “So I looked at all the most crowded gaming areas in the city, and I made a list of the defining features they had in common. I reasoned that these places must have found something important, and that I needed to copy it.”
Friedman studied more than eighty gaming halls across Nevada. He eventually wrote up his findings in a six-hundred-and-thirty-page textbook, “Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition,” which distills his research into thirteen design rules. He advocated low, featureless ceilings (“Principle 8: Low ceilings beat high ceilings”), and insisted that the slot machines be arranged in a labyrinth (“Principle 4: The maze layout beats long, wide, straight passageways and aisles”). He was scornful of any décor that wasn’t directly related to gaming (“Principle 9: The gambling equipment as the décor beats impressive and memorable decorations”), and argued that the gaming area should begin within ten feet of the hotel entrance. “You have to suck them in right away,” he told me. “And then, once you get them, you have to make it hard to leave.” Friedman’s textbook was dense with pages of complicated-looking equations that purported to link his principles to higher occupancy rates and higher yields per player.
In a sense, Friedman’s precepts were the view of an addict. “My rules work,” he told me. “I know they work because I used to gamble. I know what gamblers want.” The casinos that best matched Friedman’s precepts, however, were often confusing and claustrophobic warrens of penny slots and gaming tables. A similar logic applied to the rest of the hotel, which existed solely to funnel people through the gaming area. Despite the unpleasantness of the environment, the model propounded by Friedman appeared to be effective. For years, Las Vegas gamblers seemed perfectly happy to play games that were stacked against them in dim warehouses without any décor.
By the late seventies, however, the number of visitors to Las Vegas had plateaued, and even briefly declined. Thomas, who was working as a designer there at the time, felt that the unattractiveness of the interiors was part of the problem. “Every casino looked as if it had been built by two hookers and a pit boss,” he told me. “It was all red flock wallpaper and industrial carpets designed to hide spills.” Although the disorienting layout of the spaces ensnared gamblers—they succumbed to the slots because they couldn’t escape—it kept other tourists away.
“It was becoming clear to me that this way wasn’t working anymore,” Thomas said. “You can’t treat your guests like rats in a maze.” Nevertheless, he spent most of the decade working in the standard Vegas style. He redid the penthouses at the Stardust and the casino at the Lady Luck, which had a “Saturday Night Fever” theme. “Thank God that’s been demolished,” he said.
In 1980, Thomas ran into Steve Wynn at a charity benefit. At the time, Wynn was the owner of the Golden Nugget, an aging downtown hotel that he had turned into an upscale resort, featuring the fanciest guest rooms in the city. He invited Thomas to join his design team. Thomas said yes. “What drew me to Steve was that he also wanted to change Vegas,” he recalls. “He also didn’t want to build more of the same tasteless crap.”
One of their first major projects was the Mirage, a sprawling resort with more than three thousand rooms and a tropical theme. Thomas and the Wynn design team spent an unprecedented amount of money on the interiors. The coffee shop, for instance, featured hundreds of hand-carved pieces of Balinese wood, which had been painted to look like a tropical forest. Unfortunately, guests started picking off the wooden leaves, which meant that Thomas was constantly ordering replacements. “That’s when I began to really appreciate the support of Steve,” Thomas told me. “He didn’t yell at me for making something fragile. Instead, he congratulated me for coming up with a design so popular that people wanted a souvenir.”
The Mirage pioneered a new business strategy for Las Vegas casinos, and inspired a frenzy of imitation: the Luxor (a thirty-story pyramid clad in dark bronze glass); New York, New York (a replica of the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty); and Paris Las Vegas (featuring a replica of the Eiffel Tower). But, in the Mirage’s gambling areas, the Friedman model remained more or less intact; indeed, Friedman says that he consulted on the design of the gaming areas. Guests didn’t come for the Balinese carvings. They were lured in by the replica of an erupting volcano outside, and then conveyed onto a walkway that led directly to the cashier at the center of a dark, labyrinthine casino.
The Bellagio, however, Thomas and Wynn’s next big project, broke the mold. It was notable not merely for its unparalleled opulence—Wynn eventually spent more than three hundred million dollars on a world-class art collection for the hotel—but also for the design of the casino. “If you think about it, the traditional layout makes no sense,” Thomas told me. “People don’t want to make bets when they feel trapped or overwhelmed or confused. That’s not the mood you want.” Instead, Wynn and Thomas worked on the assumption that people would be more likely to place big, risky bets when they felt safe and relaxed. Rather than catch gamblers in a spiderweb of slot machines, a situation that risked breeding anxiety, casinos should seduce them with a sense of magnificence. “People tend to take on the characteristics of a room,” Thomas said. “They feel glamorous in a glamorous space and rich in a rich space. And who doesn’t want to feel rich?”
Thomas set about creating a casino that contravened all the rules of casino design. Whereas Friedman criticized the “open barn” plan, which he defined as any space with an expansive layout and high ceilings, Thomas created soaring ceilings swathed in silk fabric and insisted on clear sight lines for easy navigation. Friedman called for “gambling equipment immediately inside casino entrances,” with the most popular slot machines by the front door. Thomas, however, imagined an elegant lobby, not filled with penny slots but displaying a massive Dale Chihuly glass sculpture suspended from the ceiling and huge arrangements of real flowers. Traditional casinos banished clocks and any glimpses of sunlight, to make gamblers lose track of the hours. Thomas installed antique timepieces and skylights that let in the desert sun. He even broke the rule prohibiting décor in the gaming areas. While Friedman insisted that the best furniture was the gambling equipment itself, Thomas selected European-style furnishings with scrupulous care.
As conceived by Wynn and Thomas, the Bellagio represented a $1.6-billion bet on human psychology. The gamble paid off: the Bellagio generated the largest profits for a single property in Las Vegas history. And this income wasn’t a by-product of scale but a direct result of the way that Wynn’s guests spent money. Per guest room, the resort generated four times as much revenue as the Las Vegas average.
Thomas’s sumptuous designs led people to spend as they’d never spent before, and, in the years since the Bellagio was completed, research has supported the psychological assumptions that went into its creation. Karen Finlay is a professor at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, who focusses on the behavior of gamblers. Her latest experiments have immersed subjects in the interiors of various Vegas casinos by means of a Panoscope, which projects three hundred and sixty degrees of high-definition video footage. There are slot machines and card tables in every direction.
Using the Panoscope method, Finlay compared the mental effects of classic casinos, with low ceilings and a mazelike layout, to those of casinos designed by Thomas. Subjects surrounded by footage of Thomas’s interiors exhibited far higher levels of what Finlay terms mental “restoration”—that is, they were much more likely to say that the space felt like a “refuge,” and to experience lower levels of stress. They also manifested a much stronger desire to gamble. In every Panoscopic matchup, gamblers in Thomas’s rooms were more likely to spend money than those in Friedmanesque designs. Although subjects weren’t forced to focus on the slot machines, the pleasant atmosphere encouraged them to give the machines a try.
Finlay refers to Thomas’s environments as “adult playgrounds,” since they provide an atmosphere in which people are primed to seek pleasure. “These casinos have lots of light and excellent way-finding,” she told me. “They make you feel comfortable, of course, but they also constantly remind you to have fun.”
She went on, “The data is clear. Gamblers in a playground casino will stay longer, feel better, and bet more. Although they come away with bigger losses, they’re more likely to return.”
Finlay notes that the effectiveness of such designs comes at the expense of the guests, who have been persuaded by flowers and nice furniture to squander money on games whose odds favor the house. According to her findings, Thomas’s designs have a particularly marked effect on those guests who normally don’t gamble. The seduction of his décor, perhaps, is that it doesn’t feel like a gambling environment. The beauty is a kind of anesthesia, distracting people from the pain of their inevitable losses.
Thomas is the sort of man who chooses his eyeglasses—he has more than a hundred pairs, in every imaginable color—to match the pocket square in his jacket. His teeth are so white that they appear backlit, and his loafers gleam, as if they had never touched an uncarpeted surface. Indeed, Thomas is so relentlessly well groomed that even his rare forays into scruffiness have an air of deliberation. His white stubble is carefully trimmed; his hair is artfully mussed; his socks clash with his tie on purpose.
Despite this immaculate façade, Thomas is a man of contradictions. Although he is known for the excess of his professional style, his house is a strict modernist structure, of straight steel, poured concrete, and glass. He has an art collection that includes a Donald Judd sculpture, a pair of Warhol portraits of a young Thomas, a Joseph Cornell box, and a Giorgio Morandi still-life, but he seems most excited by a rustic Western stool in his bedroom, made entirely out of elk parts. At the age of forty-five, Thomas, who was brought up in the Mormon Church and had been married twice, realized that he was gay. (He is now married to Arthur Libera, a licensing agent for artists and designers.) After he came out, his younger brother, a bishop in the church, was forced to excommunicate him, but the brothers remain extremely close.
Thomas is Las Vegas royalty. His father, E. Parry Thomas, is often referred to as the “quiet kingmaker” of the city, and is widely credited with saving Vegas from the grip of organized crime. Nevada developers had always relied on the Mafia for financing, because legitimate banks refused to give casinos construction loans. But, in the nineteen-fifties, Thomas, as the young C.E.O. of the Bank of Las Vegas, saw the lack of credit as a business opportunity and began giving casinos access to clean capital. In the late sixties, he became a lead adviser to Howard Hughes, who had started buying up casinos. (Hughes moved into the penthouse of the Desert Inn during Thanksgiving week in 1966. When he overstayed his reservation, and the managers asked him to leave, he bought the hotel.)
Roger Thomas, who was born in 1951, grew up as the misfit of the family. A poor student who struggled with severe dyslexia, he found solace in the world of costume and fashion. In his junior year of high school, he transferred to the Interlochen Arts Academy, in Michigan, where he focussed on ceramics, metalwork, and weaving. Then, after getting a degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, he returned to Las Vegas and started working in interior design.
Thomas’s arts training continues to shape his design work. He is an inveterate sketcher, always clutching a black Hermès notebook. Whenever he notices a form that interests him—whether a picture frame at the Louvre or a Piccadilly shopping arcade—he will look at it for a long time in order to memorize its details. He doesn’t begin drawing until later. “Even the passage of a few hours can be very revealing,” he says. “My memory is like a filter.”
Thomas calls his sketches an “atlas of inspiration.” Before he starts planning a space, he pages through dozens of notebooks looking for things he wants to re-create. They are a guide when he starts work on the space. They also connect him to the history of interior design, particularly to the furniture of the French Baroque, an era that he reveres as a golden age of décor. It was a period of rapid aesthetic developments. Whereas the palace interiors of Louis XIV were all about the projection of power, with rigidly vertical jewel-encrusted seats and vast rooms, his successor, Louis XV, insisted that Versailles become a haven of comfort, a retreat from the burdens of the monarchy. He installed plumbing for his rosewood bidet and ordered furniture that featured padding and lumbar support. The once spare private quarters of the palace were crowded with soft chairs and couches covered in richly colored fabrics. Many of the designs were inspired by the new science of orthopedia, which aimed at preventing skeletal disorders. In the mid-eighteenth century, Diderot’s Encyclopédie defined luxury as “the use that one makes of one’s wealth and industry to obtain a pleasant way of life,” and went on, “The savage has his hammock that he buys with pelts; the European has his sofa.”
Thomas remains deeply nostalgic for these antique seats. “We’ve made a lot of chairs since the eighteenth century, but I don’t think we’ve made many better chairs,” he says. “The artisans at the French court really found the ideal luxury seat. They identified the best dimensions, the best frame, the best angles. When you sit in an authentic Jacob chair”—furniture designed by Georges Jacob filled Versailles—“you are sitting in one of the most comfortable pieces of furniture ever made. It’s a divine experience.”
Dave Hickey, a friend of Thomas’s who is a MacArthur Award-winning cultural critic, sees Thomas’s knowledge of design history as a defining feature of his style. Hickey, who lived in Las Vegas for years, bemoans the “little modern people on the coasts,” who look down on Thomas’s interiors. “Roger just knows everything,” Hickey told me. “He knows the dude in Venice who blows the glass, and can rattle off the sixteenth-century Italian tapestry-maker who inspired the carpet in the bathroom. His stuff has layers, but you don’t need to get the layers to appreciate it.”
Of course, Las Vegas design has practical constraints unanticipated by the decorators of Versailles. “In this town, a chair can’t just be pretty,” Thomas says. “Because that chair is going to get used and abused. If it’s not designed right, it won’t be pretty for long.”
Gambling, as Walter Benjamin noted, “converts time into a narcotic” and, at one level, can be seen as an endurance sport: it can lead people to spend all day planted in the same slot-machine seat. Comfort is therefore a crucial issue. Thomas’s chairs need to accommodate any conceivable body type for as long as necessary, and he has become a student of repose, obsessed with the density of cushions and the weave of fabrics. “If a chair isn’t working, if it isn’t quite as comfortable as it should be, then I’ll know about it, because people won’t sit there,” he says. “They’ll go somewhere else. The performance of the space will suffer, and the Operations guys will complain.”
The role of the Operations Department is key: in Las Vegas, everything is measured. At the Wynn, the amount of alcohol consumed at the bars is closely tracked, because many of them rely on a central distribution system in the back of the house. The Operations Department also monitors the earnings of the gaming machines and tables. If a space isn’t bringing in the expected revenue, then Thomas is often put to work. “It’s flattering, I guess, that everyone assumes my original design was part of the problem,” he says. “It shows they think design matters! But I don’t mind changing stuff. I’m always trying to build a better mousetrap.”
The mousetrap also has to last. When Thomas imagines a carpet, he thinks about all the ways that carpet will be stained. When he designs a coffee table, he has to think about how the veneer will look after getting bumped by an endless parade of roller bags. “My stuff has to be more durable than a radial tire,” he told me. When Thomas is planning a room, he spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about drunken visitors crashing into furniture and glass walls. During one of the days I spent with him, the horticulture staff was handing around a cell-phone snapshot of someone passed out in the Wynn lobby: a clubgoer had climbed an ornamental wall of rocks and fallen asleep in a flower bed. Thomas explained, “You’re always wondering, What’s going to get knocked over? Where is the guy on his third Martini going to trip?” He places sandbags in the bottom of vases, and insures that entryways are wide and “well announced.” He likes to frame them with parlor palms, since the fronds are forgiving, and he decorates every large pane of glass with a pattern of gold stickers near eye level.
The Bellagio spurred a kind of arms race of luxury design in Las Vegas. In 1999, Sheldon Adelson opened the first phase of the Venetian, a gigantic hotel featuring a model of St. Mark’s Square, which targeted the upscale market, with V.I.P. gambling salons and a collection of four-star restaurants. Around the same time, Steve Wynn sold the Bellagio and his other properties, for $6.4 billion, and set about planning a project—the Wynn—that would outdo them in opulence.
One-upmanship is inherent in the idea of luxury, of course. To spend time in a Wynn casino is to realize that interior design is ultimately a “positional good”—a term coined in the nineteen-seventies, by the economist Fred Hirsch, to denote things whose value depends purely on how consumers rank them in desirability against the competition. A Rolex doesn’t tell the time more accurately than most watches; it is a status symbol. The clutter of references in Thomas’s rooms—casino chairs that look like French antiques, light fixtures made by Italian artisans—work the same way. Las Vegas hotels provide what Dave Hickey calls “distinction without a difference”: they all peddle the same games, but in different wrappings. This is why Steve Wynn isn’t shy about detailing the exorbitant cost of his hotels. He wants to make you feel special.
Thomas, for his designs at the Wynn, combed his notebooks searching for ideas so extreme that he had never been able to use them. He designed a daybed inspired by the line of his dog’s hind legs and filled the lobby with giant pendant lights made of colorful parasols. His sketches for the lights proved difficult to implement—most light fixtures aren’t meant to move through the air—but he persisted, for three and half years commuting several times a week to a factory forty-five minutes away. Thomas also wanted to incorporate as many authentic artifacts as possible. He decided to decorate one grand staircase with six-foot-tall prewar olive jars. To find enough jars, his team spent two years scouring antique stores in Italy, Greece, and London.
When it came to the design of the casino itself, nothing was left to chance. Wynn commissioned a life-size model of the main gambling space, at a cost of nearly two million dollars. The model allowed Thomas and Wynn to test and refine every design element in the gaming area, from the lumbar support in the chairs to the chandeliers over the card tables, which make the vast casino feel like a collection of intimate dining areas. “No one in Vegas had ever put chandeliers over gambling tables before,” Thomas says. “And that’s because the fixture gets in the way of the security cameras.” It took eighteen months of patient engineering, but Thomas found a way to get a camera into the chandelier itself. All this effort appears to have paid off. According to recent financial reports, the Wynn Las Vegas and a sister hotel generate fifteen per cent more revenue per guest room than the Venetian and its sister hotel do.
Wynn and Thomas have replicated these results in China, at the Wynn Macau, which made a profit of more than seven hundred and fifty million dollars in 2011. Macau’s economy, like that of Las Vegas, is driven almost entirely by tourism; it is the only place in the country where gambling is legal. The Wynn Macau looks like a scaled-down version of the Wynn Las Vegas, and Thomas filled it with similarly rich interiors and artifacts. (Last year, he spent $12.8 million on four eighteenth-century Chinese porcelain vases previously owned by the Dukes of Buccleuch.) But working in China has produced new challenges, too, and some of Thomas’s flourishes got lost in translation. He chose periwinkle for a ceiling in one restaurant. “My first inkling that something was wrong came when none of the workers would enter,” he told me. “There’s a superstition in China that death houses are painted blue. I’ve learned to call the feng-shui guy.”
Las Vegas, being founded on the twin supports of outlandish discretionary spending and highly leveraged construction projects, was devastated by the bursting of the property bubble and the recession, and it has been going through hard times. Many expected that the downturn would make Thomas irrelevant. In this climate, even Steve Wynn might find it a stretch to fill a hotel with custom designs. But Thomas’s skills remain in great demand. As Elaine Wynn, a director of Wynn Resorts and Steve Wynn’s ex-wife, told me, “Nobody is better at giving a room a face-lift.”
I watched this process unfold in a reception area outside the gym of the Wynn Las Vegas, as Thomas and his team met with Marilyn Spiegel, the president of the hotel, to discuss renovation plans. Thomas has learned how to follow a budget, even if it requires the occasional compromise. Talking to Spiegel, he never mentioned his sketchbooks or new custom furniture. Instead, he found ways to repurpose old pieces in the warehouse and leaned heavily on the transformative powers of fresh paint. When one of his assistants pointed out signs of wear on an antique mirror, Thomas brushed aside her concerns: “It’s had a life, and I don’t mind that it’s had a life.”
Still, Thomas is most in his element working in an environment giddily free of financial constraints. Late last year, he was working frenetically on the final touches to Elaine Wynn’s new mansion in Beverly Hills. There was the installation of art to supervise, including a Joan Mitchell in the entryway and a Lucian Freud in the dining area, and piles of books to shelve in the library. Thomas decided that he would color-coördinate the spines of the books himself. He personally checked that every lampshade was straight—a few in the stairwell were off by a fraction of an inch—and tested several kinds of light bulb in the custom chandeliers. The only thing that seemed to please him was the placement of a Manet pastel in the master bedroom. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “That’s a keeper.”
By the end of the afternoon, Thomas had been working for ten hours straight and was looking tired. His starched shirt had sweat stains, his hair was matted with dust, and his posture was starting to give out, his shoulders sagging like poorly hung drapery. He quickly scanned the living room and sank into a plum velvet loveseat that he had helped design. He relaxed for a second, letting out a loud sigh. But something about the seat caught his attention. Frowning, he got up and examined the cushioning. Then he started punching the cushion and massaging it with his fist—the process is called “lofting”—to distribute the down feathers inside more evenly. This went on for several minutes, until, at last, he seemed almost satisfied. He collapsed again onto the loveseat and, for the first time that day, rested. ♦
