In Las Vegas, W Hotel Project Favors the Little Guy

Lacina Heitler Architects recently won the competition to design a new $2.5 billion W Hotel, Casino and Residences in Las Vegas. It is the largest project to date for the small New York firm, which until now had been best known for designing boutique stores in Manhattan, such as Galo, and Searle. It beat out Carlos Ott of Uruguay; Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, and the London office of HKS Architects to win the job.
The new W will be located on a 24.5-acre site just east of the Strip. Plans call for two 50-story Modernist glass towers combining for 4,000 hotel and condo-hotel units, as well as 20 restaurants, bars, and lounges. There will be a Bliss spa, fitness center, and 75,000-square-foot casino; Fred Segal, the Los Angeles retailer, will also open a 100,000-square-foot store. The complex is being developed by a joint venture between two-year-old Las Vegas–based investment company The Edge Group and Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide.
“Lacina Heitler’s design was elegant and timeless as well as realistic to build from a construction standpoint," says Adam Frank, a development team principal. “Also, as a smaller firm, they were hungry. We would be dealing with the company principals as opposed to a large design team whose names aren’t on the wall.” Groundbreaking is set for mid-2007, with completion anticipated by late 2009.