Wynn Palace

Wynn Palace opened at eight in the evening on 22 August 2016, Wynn's first resort on Cotai, ten years after Wynn Macau on the peninsula. It had cost US$4.2 billion, taken six and a half years to design and come in months late, and it had 1,706 rooms, suites and villas in a tower of 28 storeys, kept to about 115 metres by the nearby airport. Steve Wynn called it arguably the most beautiful hotel in the world, and "our gift to the community, to the public".

The gift is mostly outside. An eight-acre Performance Lake by WET, the company behind the Bellagio fountains Wynn built in Las Vegas, plays its jets to Chinese, European and American music through the afternoon and evening, and a free air-conditioned gondola, the SkyCab, carries visitors above the water into the building. Inside, the florist Preston Bailey built two moving sculptures that turn in time to music: a carousel of more than 83,000 flowers in the south atrium and a Ferris wheel of more than 103,000 in the north.

Photo: kallerna / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

The interiors were led by Roger Thomas, Wynn's chief designer, who called it his largest and most demanding project and the restaurant Wing Lei Palace the ultimate expression of his fascination with chinoiserie; the café is a chinoiserie in red, orange and white, and a penthouse bathroom floor carries a Chinese cloud pattern in Venetian mosaic. Guest designers included David Rockwell and Vicente Wolf. In 2026 Wynn announced The Enclave, a 432-suite tower without gaming beside the east entrance. OKYTO's Cotai architecture guide sets it among its neighbours.

The art and antiques, assembled over six years, were valued at more than US$125 million at the opening: Jeff Koons's three-ton steel Tulips stands by the flower wheel, an eighteenth-century rock-crystal chandelier hangs in the Wing Lei bar, and the centrepiece is a quartet of Qing porcelain vases that Wynn Macau bought at Christie's in London in 2011. The only other such quartet, the company says, is at Buckingham Palace.

Sources: Roger Thomas; Wynn Resorts; Wynn Macau; Macau Daily Times; GGRAsia; GGRAsia; Wikipedia; Wynn Palace