Archive for the ‘ARIA’ Category

Say hello to Haze.

And so it begins. A new era in Sin City nightlife has taken hold, with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR new nightclubs open or opening within a month of each other.

In a city with so many clubs, this may seem like a drop in the bucket, but don’t be fooled. Just like every year’s new car models add some bells and whistles, so do clubs. Only heated seats are swapped for multimillion dollar, one-of-a-kind sound and lighting systems. (So, you know, it’s just a smidge different.)

What’s more, three of these clubs are housed inside the massive CityCenter complex (a revolution unto intself), so there’s really a home for nightlife in Vegas now. Or, at the very least, a place you can hit up and party at a bunch of different places until you finally collapse into your hotel bed.

Here’s a rundown of what’s new in the Sin City Scene. (Sin City nightclub Scene just doesn’t flow as well):

• Haze at Aria opens New Year’s Eve with a massive light wall and a sound/lighting speaker system controlled in full view from the center-club DJ booth. These controls can literally change the atmosphere of the club, lighting things up, or even, in the case of metal rig-like contraptions hung above the dance floor, making the place move.
• Eve at The Crystals in CityCenter also opens New Year’s Eve, with partner/owner Eva Longoria Parker doing hosting duties. The club, which sits atop Parker’s restaurant Beso, has some amazing views (through actual windows! in a club!) of the CityCenter complex.
• Gold Lounge at Aria is already in full effect. It’s Elvis’ Graceland meets Las Vegas nightclub, so think less kitsch, more hip (that …sort of rhymes, right?). With a stallion lamp and monkey detailing, plus a drink menu that recalls The King himself (Blue Suede Shoes anybody?) it’s not hard to imagine you’re reaching Presley levels of party. Which, as we understand it, is pretty good.
• Vanity at Hard Rock Hotel rounds out the New Year’s pack with a theme that could not be more about you. We’re serious — mirrored surfaces, manicurists and make up attendants in the bathroom, it’s all about you. Plus, it’s the Hard Rock, so nightlife veterans in town know to expect good things. And if you’re not a nightlife veteran? Expect good things anyway.

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You and your “significant other” are taking advantage of some alone time in your hotel room. You are scantily, if at all, clad when it occurs to you that the maid may come busting in at any moment. But you don’t want to ruin the mood by throwing on clothes and running out into the hallway to put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign. What are you to do?

At CityCenter’s Aria Resort & Casino and Mandarin Oriental, the answer is as simple as pressing a button. Thanks to technology by Control4, you can post a “Do Not Disturb” message, dim the lights, play some mood music and order a bottle of champagne, all with the touch of a remote.

The home screen for the Control4 Suite System.

While you’re at it, you can check to see if your flight home is on time, adjust the room temperature and open the drapes to take in the view. You can check the outside temperature, so you know if you need to take a coat when you leave for dinner, or you could simply order dinner to be delivered to your door.

Both Aria and Mandarin Oriental have integrated Control4’s technology into their rooms and suites, providing guests with hands on (or off, as the case may be) control over the room’s environment, in-room entertainment and concierge-type services.

“We are all about the guest experience,” said Glenn Mella, president and COO of Control4, adding, “I heard someone saying, if the room were an ‘8,’ the technology makes it a ‘10.’”

The personalized service starts from the moment you open your door. The first time a guest swipes his or her key, the room essentially wakes up to greet them. The lights turn on, the drapes open and the television turns on.

The guest will see his or her name displayed in the top left hand corner of the television, which is tuned to a home  screen with options for lighting, thermostat, services, curtains or entertainment. The temperature inside the room and outside the hotel is presented in the bottom right corner. Guests will also see useful messages on their home screen, (i.e. “The room door is ajar,” “The deadbolt is locked,” “I am watching you,” — Ok, I may have made that last one up). The same home screen is found on a 7-inch touch screen sitting on the bedside table.

Guests may use provided scenes for lighting, temperature, etc., or program their own scenes to fit their needs at different times throughout the day. So if you like to wake up to a slow fade of lights as your blackout drapes open, the temperature rises and the smooth sounds of Burt Bacharach fill the air — you’re in luck. If you prefer to have every single light in the room turn on suddenly as Def Leppard screeches in your ears, you’re also in luck.

The guest room at Aria.

Best of all, everything is controlled with one simple remote.

Of course, if you’re old fashioned, non tech-savvy or have some sort of lifelong debilitating fear of remote controls, there are also manual controls for everything in the room, from lights to temperature.

The Control4 Suite System is compatible with CityCenter’s overall mission of sustainability by making guests’ stays more energy efficient. For instance, there’s no reason to leave the bathroom light on all night long, when all you have to do to turn it off or on is press a button on a remote. If you left the remote in the bathroom, however, that’s another story.

Sixty minutes after a guest checks out of the room or suite the Control4 system goes into “Unoccupied Mode.” The lights turn off, the drapes close and the temperature adjusts.

Aria and Mandarin Oriental are the first hotels in Vegas to implement Control4’s technology, though the company will soon be installing their systems in other Vegas hotels, including the Rush Towers at Golden Nugget and the PH Towers at Planet Hollywood.

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WET, the design firm that created the fountains at Bellagio and the Mirage Volcano, now has another prescence in Vegas with the opening of CityCenter.

The company has created five water features for the proptery, all designed to complement the development’s sophistication.

The Focus water feature at Aria.

Visitors who pull up to Aria’s porte-cochère will immediately notice Lumia, a fountain featuring large arcs and twisting ribbons of water. As its name suggests, light plays a big part in the fountain -it’s the first to be lit in bright, vibrant colors during broad daylight. In keeping with the resort’s commitment to being green, all of the water is recycled and the fountain even has a computerized system that can detect windy days and help control splashing if the breeze gets too strong.

Also located outside the entrance to Aria is Focus, a curved water wall that measures 250 feet long by 24 feet high – WET’s largest water wall to date. The wall is made of gray slate tiles from India that are shaped in a diamond cut. The fountain was designed to complement the organic feel of Aria and to provide a calming influence on guests.

The fountain is completely programmable and the engineers can control the speed and direction that the water runs. The water falls into a pool at the bottom that is only an eighth of an inch deep.

When entering Aria from the casino side, guests will notice Latisse, a series of two-story-high water walls composed of thick, textured glass. The feature has the effect of giving you an idea of what it would feel like to walk underneath a waterfall.

WET also has two designs inside the Crystals shopping center at CityCenter. Halo is a collection of clear tubes placed at different angles that feature spinning vortices of water. There are 20 above-ground tubes and 30 windows underfoot that allow people to watch the water underneath. The lighting on the feature
changes colors and it was designed to allow people to be able to walk through and get an up-close view of the water.

The Glacia feature at Crystals

Glacia, also located in Crystals, is a feature that includes 13 columns of ice emerging from a pool of water. As each column rises from the control room below, it is carved into a different pattern, which means the feature will never look the same twice. The highest column rises 15 feet and the columns can be one to
two feet in diameter.

A chilled rod inside the column keeps the ice frozen for long periods of time and once they are melted, a new column is frozen, which can take up to 13 hours. WET can control how clear the ice is depending on how much air is blown into it, resulting in ice that is sometimes crystal clear and sometimes crackled or a frosty white. Accompanying the surreal ice feature is a surreal soundtrack of music created my Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead.

*Photos by Aleza Freeman

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Aria Resort & Casino. Photo courtesy of CityCenter.

Fireworks will kick off the public opening of Aria Resort & Casino tonight, marking the official grand opening of CityCenter. Aria brings 4,004 guestrooms, 150,000 square feet of gaming, 15 restaurants, a nightclub, a spa, a Cirque show and more to the Las Vegas Strip.

Aria is the fourth building on the CityCenter campus to open following Vdara Hotel & Spa on Dec. 1, Crystals retail and entertainment district on Dec. 3 and the Mandarin Oriental on Dec. 4.

Even so, Aria can flaunt its own illustrious list of firsts. It is not only the largest hotel in the world to earn a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council but it will also feature the most technologically advanced guestrooms in the country. 

Sustainability

Here are a few highlights of Aria’s “green friendly” initiatives:

• Slot machine bases that serve as floor air-conditioning distribution units in order to cool public spaces from the ground up.
• An overall design that includes extensive natural light, said to dramatically reduce lighting power requirements.
•  Two recycling docks for collection and separation of glass, paper, cardboard, metals, plastic, food waste and grease.

CityCenter overall is considered one of the world’s largest sustainable developments.

Billed as a pedestrian friendly campus, CityCenter offers a free monorail providing easy transport between the Monte Carlo hotel next door, Crystals, Vdara and Bellagio next door. The campus also offers preferred parking for hybrid vehicles and a bicycle valet.

Many of the materials used in the construction of CityCenter were brought in from within 500 miles of Las Vegas, in order to minimalize required transportation. A majority of the wood products selected are FSC certified, meaning they come from sustainably managed forests.

Ninety-seven percent of the construction waste from the former Boardwalk hotel, imploded in 2006, was reused or recycled during the construction of CityCenter, thanks to a large-scale recycling and resue operation. Although the waste from the Boardwalk hotel wasn’t all necessarily used to actually build CityCenter, it did go to other construction projects. Overall, the CityCenter project utilized more than 260,000 tons of construction waste.

Read more about CityCenter’s green initiatives.

Technology

All 4,300 ARIA guestrooms, meanwhile, will feature technological advances that are unmatched within the United States. Control4, a company that specializes in residential and hospitality automation, has provided suite systems that allow guests to control their room enviroment with the touch of a remote. 

Don’t be caught off guard when your room “greets” you as you enter it for the first time. The room will fill with light, the curtains will part and the TV will turn on to display a list of automated controls to personalize.

Some other features from Control4 Suite Systems include:

• One-touch control of lighting, room temperature, television/video systems, music, wake-up calls, draperies and requests for services through a single remote control.
• One-button modification of room settings. “Good Night,” for example, turns off lights, TV and/or music; shuts curtains and turns on privacy notification.
• Keyless locks utilizing RFID technology reduce the failure of room keys.
• In-room devices which automatically “communicate” maintenance needs; remote control batteries will be replaced before guests notice a problem, and more.

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CityCenter is a 67-acre urban metropolis and one of the world’s largest green developments. The property includes Aria, a 61-story, 4004-room gaming resort; the non-gaming Mandarin Oriental, Vdara Hotel & Spa and Veer Towers; and Crystals, a 50,000-square-foot retail and entertainment district. The Harmon boutique hotel will open in 2010. Enjoy a tour of CityCenter through this photo gallery:

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CityCenter opens to the public next month, bringing a 67-acre urban metropolis and one of the world’s largest green developments to the Las Vegas Strip. The property includes Aria, a 61-story, 4004-room gaming resort; the non-gaming Mandarin Oriental, Vdara Hotel & Spa and Veer Towers; and Crystals, a 50,000-square-foot retail and entertainment district. The Harmon boutique hotel will open in 2010. Here’s photos and video to provide an inside look at the outside of CityCenter:

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CityCenter opens to the public next month, bringing a 67-acre urban metropolis and one of the world’s largest green developments to the Las Vegas Strip. The property includes Aria, a 61-story, 4004-room gaming resort; the non-gaming Mandarin Oriental, Vdara Hotel & Spa and Veer Towers; and Crystals, a 50,000-square-foot retail and entertainment district. The Harmon boutique hotel will open in 2010. Here’s photos and video to provide an inside look at the outside of CityCenter:

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Cirque du Soleil hasn’t revealed much about its Elvis-themed show that will be staged at the new Aria hotel at CityCenter, but today the company unveiled the name of the production: “Viva ELVIS.”

The show, billed as “a tribute to the life and music of Elvis Presley,” will be staged in an 1,800-seat theater and will feature a combination of dance, acrobatics and live music. “Viva ELVIS” will also include acting, which is something that hasn’t been seen in other Cirque shows.

The story of significant moments and relationships in Elvis’ life will be intertwined with Elvis’ chart-topping music to portray to audiences who Elvis really was.

No opening date has been given for the show, but the Aria hotel is set to open Dec. 16.

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