New Wynn Las Vegas convention space open

The first convention customers began using the new two-story, 430,000-square-foot meeting space at Wynn Las Vegas on Monday, and the company already has bookings lined up out to 2028.

The company considers the $423 million addition, which includes an 83,000-square-foot pillarless ballroom, an extension of the Wynn Meeting and Convention space. It has more than doubled the property’s rentable meeting area, by 300,000 square feet to 560,000, across 57 flexible meeting rooms.

At Wynn, conventioneers trekking to the desert are seeing more greenery than they may have expected with the new venue hugging the redesigned Tom Fazio-developed Wynn Golf Club. The golf course reopened in October after Fazio created eight new holes and revamped 10 others.

“I think we’re most excited about all of the different views that we have here,” said Chris Flatt, executive vice president of hotel sales and marketing. “We have a lot of outdoor spaces which we know our customers love here. We have patios from most of our meeting rooms and beautiful promenades outside of the large ballroom.”

One of the highlights of the new space was developed by Roger Thomas, executive vice president of design for Wynn Resorts: an indoor-outdoor area nestled along the 17th and 18th holes of the golf course.

Outdoors is a 20,000-square-foot pavilion with an adjacent 20,000-square-foot lawn. A patio connects a line of golf course-facing meeting rooms.

The floor-to-ceiling windows on both the top and bottom floors of the building offer views of the two holes. The 18th hole has been shortened to a par 3, and conventioneers can look down the track from the tee box, past a small water feature to a green with a 100-foot-wide waterfall that is 10 feet tall behind it.

The course includes 7,000 mature trees — some dating to the 1950s, when the land was home to the historic Desert Inn Golf Club — 100,000 shrubs, several ponds, streams, and sand bunkers.

Early opening

“We were scheduled to open in March and we have a very high percentage of repeat business here and had several customers of ours that literally wanted to be the first groups in the hotels,” Flatt said. “We actually opened about three weeks earlier than anticipated.”

The company has a policy prohibiting disclosure of the name of the first customer, but the first gathering was for a corporate business meeting.

Wynn continued its trend of exhibiting art within its walls and the new meeting space is no exception.

Displays will include African and Indonesian art, Venetian glass mirrors and 19th and 20th century furniture, Flatt said.

“Anywhere you look, you’re going to see something different,” she said. “Tapestries are something that we love, they tell great stories so you’ll see a lot of those hanging on the walls here. They’re just beautifully done, hand-woven and very colorful.”

One major art piece in a prominent position is the “Smiling King Bear,” a pop-surreal sculpture created by famed Spanish contemporary artist Okuda San Miguel.

“He was originally brought in for the retail plaza,” Flatt said of the multicolored geometric bear. “We didn’t feel he was in a space where enough people could actually see him. And he was a little large for the space that he was in so we felt like this was a better opportunity for our guests to see him and welcome them into our new space. Bears are supposed to be outdoors anyway. He’s much happier out on the golf course.”

More convention space

The new Wynn space is part of a major expansion in meeting and conference space across the valley this year.

The Caesars Forum conference facility opening in March will include 550,797 square feet of exhibit space with a 107,000-square-foot outdoor plaza on 29 acres in the shadow of the High Roller near the Linq Promenade. The Forum will figure prominently in April’s NFL Draft activities.

The $90 million, 315,000-square-foot Expo at World Market Center Las Vegas will open its doors in the summer and will host a rodeo event in December.

And, the Las Vegas Convention Center will take possession of its West Exhibit Hall including 600,000 square feet of new space with a January 2021 opening date. The $980.3 million facility, fronting Convention Center Drive, also will have meeting rooms and a third-floor outdoor reception space with a view of the Las Vegas Strip.

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.

A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the cost of the addition.