Hospitality Design - July 2017 - 127

Property photos by BARBARA KRAFT

The tree-lined atrium at the Wynn Las Vegas
Pacific. They had no sense of it, no priority, and
no sensitivity.
[Developer] Jay Sarno showed up in the
'60s. He and I had the same youthful, profound
experience. In 1954, a guy named Ben Novack
and his brother Joe conceived with an architect
named Morris Lapidus a hotel called the
Fontainebleau [in Miami]. The hotel itself was
going to be a series of experiential moments
that included formal French gardens-sort
of a Jewish version of Versailles-a gorgeous
soaring high-ceiling lobby, a lot of curvilinear
spaces and curved staircases, murals on the wall
of 18th-century France, a fabulous showroom,
and, beyond the garden, an expansive cabana
and pool club, a beautiful spa, and a curved
building with blue glass. The Fontainebleau
was going to set a new standard of destination
resorts on planet Earth, and it was received
that way.
Sarno went on to build a motel in Atlanta
called the Cabana. Then, he built another one
even more ambitious in Palo Alto, California,
called the Palo Alto Cabana, in partnership with
Doris Day and her husband [Martin Melcher].
If you saw the first drawing of Caesars Palace,
it's the Palo Alto Cabana. And [Sarno] met
Jimmy Hoffa, got an $18 million mortgage, and
did to Las Vegas what Ben and Joe Novack did
to Miami Beach, and it was off to the races of
creating places that were themselves a show.
All of a sudden, Las Vegas was open to
legitimate financing and big money showed up,
and he and I were at just the right age, at the

right place, at the right time, and pretty much
everything that follows has its roots [in that].

Roger, were these historical antecedents
weighing heavily on you?
RT: At the time Steve showed up, I was already
bored of Las Vegas. I had grown up [eating]
dinner at the Sands and watching Frank Sinatra
perform or Dean Martin or Sammy Davis Jr.,
or whoever at Uncle Jack's place; [it] was not
unusual. As I became more educated, I became
aware that there was a thinness to Las Vegas.
When I met Steve, what captivated me about him
and about that one talk we had about Victoria Bay
is that Steve valued quality. He wanted to give
a depth of experience to Las Vegas that hadn't
been done before. He didn't want fake marble.
He wanted it real. He believed that his customer
could not be fooled-that quality spoke to a level
of the soul that made you want to come back. And
I listened to that, and he gave me a chance.
SW: We were both educated because of our
parents. We had the overwhelming advantage of
college degrees. Our predecessors of the '50s and
'60s were not such fortunate people. They were
self-made men from the fringes of legitimate
business. We, on the other hand, were kids with
silver spoons born in our mouths. We had gone to
the best schools, had all the benefits.
RT: We also had parents who said do what you
want to do-do what your passion is. You don't
have to do what I do, just do what you love. I have
parents whom you would expect [would want me]
to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a banker. We had

The serene lagoon surrounding Costa
di Mare inside the Wynn Las Vegas
all those in my family, but I wasn't one of them.
SW: My story [is] slightly different. My father
was only 47 when he died on the table in heart
surgery, about six weeks before I graduated from
college. I was scheduled for law school. I would've
ended up a developer anyway, but I would have
never been allowed to come to Las Vegas if my
father had been alive. All of a sudden, I was
the head of the family, in the bingo business in
Maryland, and I could do pretty much what I
wanted. So, I came to Las Vegas because of a
Hospitality Design - July 2017

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