Bellagio: Steve Wynn's Lake Como Boat Ride and the $1.6 Billion Desert Lake

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In 1992 Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts bought the Dunes Hotel for about $75 million, demolished it along with a corner Denny's, and cleared a 77-acre site on the Las Vegas Strip. The 1994 plan was a French-themed resort called Beau Rivage around a 50-acre lake. After 10 months of design work, designer Jon Jerde visited Lake Como, Wynn followed, and on a boat ride with Paul Anka he saw the village of Bellagio, walked its streets for half a day and scrapped the French concept. Construction began in November 1995 with Marnell Corrao Associates, and the resort cost $1.6 billion, then the most expensive hotel in the world. To build its 8.5-acre lake despite a 1990 Clark County water ordinance, engineers showed it would use less water than the old Dunes golf course, and the ordinance was modified in February 1994.

Bellagio opened October 15, 1998, drew 80,000 visitors on day one, and charged about $200 a night against a Strip average near $81. Its $260 million cash flow in 1999 fell short of Wynn's $300 million forecast, and in May 2000 MGM Grand, run by Kirk Kerkorian, acquired Mirage Resorts as Wynn stepped away. By 2003 less than half of revenue came from the casino, and by 2004 Bellagio was the most profitable hotel casino in Las Vegas. In 2019 MGM sold the property to Blackstone for $4.25 billion and leased it back for $245 million a year.

• Developers paid nearly $10,000 each for mature Japanese privets from Ventura County, California, and reused about 300 pines from the Dunes golf course.
• Elaine Wynn chose Dale Chihuly's 2,000-square-foot Fiori di Como glass ceiling after seeing his glass art at the bottom of his lap pool.
• The fountains shoot water 460 feet high and had performed over 240,000 shows by 2018.
• Cirque du Soleil's O plays in a $100 million theater built around a 1.5 million gallon pool with hydraulic lifts.
• A power line failure in April 2004 blacked out the resort for three days, and Bobby's Room, with a $20,000 minimum buy-in, became the Legends Room in 2020.