The Fontainebleau, the 63-story Las Vegas Strip megaresort that’s stood unfinished for nearly a decade as a glaring symbol of the Great Recession, has a new name and a new plan to resurrect it as one of Sin City’s must-see luxury destinations.
The consortium headed by New York-based real estate developer Witkoff that bought the blue-tinted monolith from Carl Icahn last August for $600 million is partnering with Marriott International to open it as the Drew Las Vegas with a casino, 500,000 square feet of convention and meetings space, a variety of entertainment, nightlife and retail attractions, including more than 20 restaurants, and a redesigned pool deck.
The tower will be reconfigured as three Marriott-operated hotels, totaling 4,000 rooms and suites and featuring the Strip’s first JW Marriott and the global hospitality giant’s top-end boutique-style “Edition” brand.
As for the uncommon name, its origin is reported to a personal one for Witkoff, whose son Andrew died of an OxyContin overdose in 2011 at the age of 22.
In an e-mail to the Las Vegas Review-Journal a spokesperson said only that new name “feels familiar and approachable, but also fresh and modern, and it reflects what people are craving in Las Vegas and signals the experiences Witkoff and Marriott will deliver.”
A 2020 opening is planned with Las Vegas hospitality industry veteran John Unwin on board to help oversee the development, launch and operation through the consulting firm Two Blackbirds Hospitality. It was Unwin who took control of a half-finished Cosmopolitan in 2009 and pulled it through the recession to a 2010 opening as the last ground-up resort to debut on the Strip.
“It is going to be a design-forward building, and when we bring it all together, people are going to say, ‘I really want to come back,’” Steven Witkoff, chairman and CEO of the real estate firm, told the Associated Press. “The structure here is so well-conceived, even from nine years ago, that there are a lot of possibilities for us to put our imprint from a design standpoint on that property.”
The $2.9 billion, 3,900-room Fontainebleau was 70 percent complete when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, stripping the project of its financing and forcing the developer, privately held Fontainebleau Resorts, owner of its famed Miami flagship, into bankruptcy the following year.
Icahn’s NV Gaming Acquisition bought it in 2010 for $150 million and immediately began shopping it, but its location at the sparsely trafficked far north end of the Strip—where several megaresort projects were abandoned both during and after the recession—has not been of tremendous interest to investors.
The SLS Las Vegas, which was grafted onto the old Sahara in 2015, has gone through three owners in as many years and continues to struggle as a tourist draw.
Just west of it on Las Vegas Boulevard the much-heralded Asian-themed Lucky Dragon has gone belly up after only a year.
Almost directly across from Fontainebleau, Genting Group’s much anticipated Resorts World Las Vegas has been on the drawing board 2013. Hopes that its eventual opening, now slated for 2020, will prove a catalyst for the North Strip seem more palpable now with the Marriott partnership at the Drew and Wynn Resort’s recently announced plans for a resort of several thousand rooms not far from Resorts World at the site of the demolished New Frontier.
Marriott International will bring to the project a loyalty program 100-million members strong.
Tony Capuano, executive vice president and global chief development officer for Marriott International, said the company was attracted by the project’s enormous MICE capacity, which will be among the Strip’s largest.
“Las Vegas is obviously an extraordinary market, principally driven by leisure transients and group business, and when you look at the facilities program for the complex, it is uniquely positioned to take advantage of both of those strong demand sectors,” he said. “Obviously, with almost 4,000 rooms, it gives you the scale and footprint to compete with many of the large, well-known casino-hotels on the Strip.”
There is the fact also that both the Drew and Resorts World openings will coincide with the completion of a multibillion-dollar expansion at the nearby Las Vegas Convention Center, which forecasts say will draw 600,000 new visitors to the city.
Witkoff said, “We think that growth is coming and is going to come here.”
