When Todd-Avery Lenahan, president and chief creative officer of Wynn Design and Development, shares the design details behind reimagining the six villas at Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star Wynn Tower Suites, he makes the process sound simple. In reality, the attributes of the $70 million project blow the mind.
“When the hotel was designed 24 years ago, these [villas] were the best in [Las Vegas],” Lenahan says of the invitation-only suites that Wynn’s top international customers have sought after for two decades. “But so [many new accommodations] have come on board since that time that it was important for us not just to create the finest villas in Las Vegas, but the finest accommodations in the world.”
With that call to action, he set out to eclipse what guests will find at the finest hotels in Paris, London, New York and Dubai. “I looked at what our customers experience on the world stage of travel and how they live in their homes,” he says, drawing on his 20-year history as an independent designer of lavish hotels and residences.
The renovation costs average about $11.6 million per villa, including the gallery space that serves as the entryway. Two villas have two stories with four bedrooms and 10 bathrooms each, and four are single-story with two bedrooms and six bathrooms per unit. The top-to-bottom makeover took more than two and a half years.
“Your private accommodation, while you’re in residence with us, has to be this incredibly distilling sanctuary that feels highly anticipatory,” Lenahan says. “It feels like a home to you in the truest sense. We wanted to eschew everything that people conventionally associate with a hotel mega-suite because that’s not what these are. These are incredible garden residences.”
He aimed to create spaces that discerning, well-traveled Wynn guests haven’t seen or stayed in before. “We focused on supreme comfort and luxury, supreme sensitivity to function and how you live and unwind,” Lenahan adds. “But we do this with an element of surprise that makes the experience memorable, positive emotionally, and with an incredible number of bespoke responses in the design details.”
Accessible by private elevators in the Tower Suites arrival conservatory, the transition from the real world to this “rarefied air” environment, as Lenahan characterizes it, happens swiftly. As the golden doors open, the villa’s dramatic arrival gallery, which acts as a processional way to discover a treasure chest of artworks and artifacts from 20th-century vintage objects to rarities dating back to the 17th century, welcomes you.
Awash in daylight during the early hours and glowing in the evening from champagne-gilded Murano chandeliers and vintage alabaster pendant globes, the gallery’s collection of furniture and antiques is just the beginning of the experience.
Every villa ranges from 13,000 to 18,000 square feet and embodies “supreme comfort” with multiple master suites, media rooms and gardens with pools. They feature new furnishings, finishes, lighting, bedding, in-room technology and comprehensive en-suite fitness and wellness elements. Lenahan redid the bathrooms and closets and changed the architectural cadence of the floorplans.
“Although the villas are impressive in scale,” he says, “the goal was still to bring a level of detail, appointment and finish that creates incredible intimacy and humanity. It’s about what I call ‘intimacy within grandeur,’ where you feel like this space has been created with you in mind.”
The design draws upon Classicism, Cubism and Fauvism with Fortuny textiles, whimsical touches of Fornasetti decor, Baccarat crystal and Hermès accents. Mirroring what is found in the gallery, each villa showcases a rare collection of art and furniture that Lenahan acquired, collected or created.
“[The furniture] has to be beautiful, but most importantly, extremely comfortable,” he says. “It is the quality that you would find in a very fine home. We can take care of the villas at a very high level. So, we can do things that are a bit more fragile and delicate [than the typical resort] because it’s a low-use environment.”
Many precious pieces displayed at the villas were recently purchased from an auction of treasures from the Getty estate. Over the years, Lenahan has developed deep relationships with art dealers and auction houses, and they make a personal call when extraordinary things become available.
“I’m an art collector,” he says. “Many of the world’s best galleries know of me. They’ll call me first to let me know about something that might be coming available. I’ll acquire something knowing that I can incorporate it into a project at some point.”
Lenahan points out two glass and crystal cabinets made by the same craftsman who created the iconic Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park. “It came to us in over 380 individual pieces, all of which had to be fully assembled on site,” Lenahan says. “It’s an extraordinary work. We had a very sophisticated and highly trained art installation company, but there were detailed instructions, and then we had the specialists at Christie’s.”
Colombian textile artist Olga de Amaral is also one of his favorites; her work can be seen at the villas. “She’s in the most important collections in the world, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Tate, and a piece of hers came available through a private owner,” he says.
Lenahan guarantees a safe, museum-like environment for these prized works: “The different climates through which these rare and extraordinary pieces have traveled in is often what ages them and damages them. In Las Vegas, we have one of the most incredibly stable environments, atmospherically, that is wonderful for preserving them.”
Some furniture and artwork will depart Las Vegas in 2025 and eventually be incorporated into Wynn’s upcoming Al Marjan Island resort in the UAE. The villas will act as a canvas for the design and development of other future projects.
“It’s a beautifully collected palette,” says Lenahan of the ongoing work, which juxtaposes contemporary with historical. “Everything has an incredible seamlessness to how it feels. That’s a big part of what I do — the commingling of then and now.”
