( above ) Model Emina Cunmulaj , Founder and Chairman of sbe Entertainment , Sam Nazarian and musician Lenny Kravitz attend the SLS grand opening
( l .) Center Bar at SLS
“ We were running the Sahara during this time ,” he says . “ I was 30 when I bought it , so we were running it for four years , recognizing a whole new pattern . But at the same time , we were being educated , because there were so many projects that opened between 2007 and 2011 — Cosmopolitan being the last . This is how the lifestyle hotel has taken over the Strip .”
Joe Faust is the head of Dakota Development , the branch of sbe Entertainment that develops these hotel , nightclub and restaurant properties . The motto for Dakota is inspiring —“ Collaborate with industry visionaries to create culturally transcendent properties that become a place of community for generations .”
Dakota has built properties from greenfields and rebuilt existing buildings . Faust says there are pros and cons to each .
“ It ’ s hard to say whether one is easier than the other ,” he says . “ Ground-up construction which we have under way in Seattle and in Philadelphia is certainly a lot more straightforward . You ’ ve got a clean slate and you can kind of design what you want , you can size the rooms the way you want , you can make the program be what you want it to be .
“ But the adaptive reuse and the renovation of properties is also fun . Just the mere fact that you have to work with the box as it is can be very challenging . And it ’ s actually very exciting to take some of the worst aspects of a building and find a way , through creativity , to make it the best thing about a particular project . We did that a lot at SLS Vegas .”
HEARTBREAK HOTEL
A rash Azarbarzin is the president of sbe Hotels , which includes such brands as SLS , Raleigh , Redbury and others . He says the complexity of the transformation of the Sahara to SLS was a matter of what part of the hotel you were in .
“ There are certain areas in the hotel which were added by Mr . ( Bill ) Bennett , for example — the NASCAR Café , the Sahara Theater , and all of those new areas with high ceilings and very good bones and structure ,” he explains . “ In those areas , we kept the walls pretty much where they were , and we just enhanced it . There are two towers that Mr . Bennett added in 1989 and ’ 90 , what we call the World Tower today , where we did a very nice renovation , but the bones and infrastructure were great . Other areas , like the old Tunis Tower , which is the Story Tower today , and Alexandria Tower , which is the Lux Tower today , we went down to a complete gut renovation .
“ We went down to the concrete . Everything — plumbing , electrical , rises — they were all taken out , and a brand new infrastructure was added . And there was a wooden structure in the middle of the hotel that was the original bingo parlor , that had nine-foot ceilings , and it was really a bottleneck that we completely took out and replaced with a brand-new building .” Faust says “ good bones ” means exactly what it sounds like . “ When we were looking at properties to buy early on in Las Vegas , we looked at a handful of different properties to take the lens off and see what ’ s exactly there . You ’ re looking at what the structure is , how you can open it up , how you can fit what your ideal vision of the property would be .” Some properties wouldn ’ t work , Faust says .
“ We looked at the Riviera , and I told Sam that we ’ d never be able to work with it because of the way it was constructed and built . It had columns and load-bearing walls and all sorts of things coming down so you could never be able to adapt exactly what we wanted to do .” The Sahara was different , says Faust . “ It had three separate guest room towers . It had a low-rise that was not that terribly old , but you could gut it back to structure and reuse it . And we did a lot of that ; we used a lot of the existing MEP systems that were already in place that were in decent shape . Then we put in new and we added things that we needed that didn ’ t exist
Designer Philippe Starck ’ s whimsical sculpture in front of SLS , porte cochere
20 CASINO DESIGN 2014