A staff of 135, including forty-three private butlers, speaks eleven languages. With nearly three-quarters of the guests flying in from Asia, MGM Mirage (the two corporations merged in April 2000) took great care to create a comfortable, cross-cultural air. Cardoza sought to provide a visual intelligence unavailable in any other hotel in town. From the simplest Doric column to the asymmetrical façade, architects Gerald L.
There are seventeen different palettes, two hundred and fifty variations of handmade tiles, stenciled cedar beams, raised moldings, twenty-four-karat gold-leafed medallions and numerous private indoor pools.Īn exuberant liberty has been taken in the construction of a Tuscan residence of 290,000 square feet, yet there is measured restraint in the matter of detail. All else at the Mansion is as exacting.Īccommodations range from a 2,700-square-foot one-bedroom villa to a 12,000-square-foot palazzo, and no two units have the same look or layout. In the desert, where the temperature dips to the forties and often shoots beyond one hundred, the atrium has been engineered to remain at a perfect seventy-three degrees. Beyond high hand-forged iron gates and colonnaded chambers is an atrium topped with a soaring glass dome that evokes two nineteenth-century gems: the Milan Galleria and London's Crystal Palace.
