It sounds like the name of the newest restaurant in town, but instead, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group is the name of the prestigious group that will manage the MGM Grand's $5 billion Project CityCenter's anchor hotel. Their goal is to make the hotel "Bellagio-like", creating a more intimate vacation destination than a 4,000-room hotel-casino can presently offer.
The Mandarin Oriental, currently operating 22 luxury hotels in 17 countries, is one of the pre-eminent worldwide hotel brands and will be a great addition to the Las Vegas inventory because of their ability to attract upscale visitors from Asia and Europe.
CityCenter represents the next major transformation of Las Vegas into an urban environment and will be a critical component for future growth in the Vegas valley. It's going to add to Las Vegas' impact on the world like no other project possibly could. Managing this largest single privately financed construction project in U.S. hisgtory will prove to be a major challenge, including parking and traffic disruption issues on the Strip. In fact, traffic flows were actually analyzed in order to produce a design that minimized disruptions for the MGM Mirage and the community with two primary automobile entrances on two sides, one at Harmon Avenue, and another from the Strip with building materials being brought in along Harmon Avenue and Frank Sinatra Drive.
CityCenter will also have 18,000 parking spaces, all close to individual properties and hidden from view. Plans also call for a people-mover connecting to the monorail through the Mandalay Resort Group properties south of the project which will eventually connect through Caesars with a people-mover at the Mirage and Treasure Island sites.
The idea is to create an urban transit-type of transportation system and a forward-looking urban project, not just transportation and hotel rooms, but with all the elements of modern urban living.
In addition to the architectural group of Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn, the roster of architects working on CityCenter also includes Cesar Pelli and Associates, Cesar Pelli, Rafael Vinoly Architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Adam Tihany and Sir Norman Foster with Gensler acting as executive architecture firm overseeing the overall design of CityCenter. Tishman Construction Corp. is the executive construction manager, Perini Corp. is the general contractor and the Light Group, which operates the Light nightclub and Fix restaurant at Bellagio, will operate a second boutique hotel.
Details of the 400-room Mandarin Oriental project will be announced after the final negotiations on the management contract have been completed. Construction on the project, which is expected to start in four or five months, should take 40 more months to complete. In addition to the Mandarin Oriental, the completed project will include a 60-story, 4,000-room hotel-casino, 500,000 square feet of retail space, a second 400-room, nongaming boutique hotel and two 500-unit condominium high-rises.
So what do we take from all this? Most importantly, MGM Grand continues to do everything right. And it's becoming more and more clear that if anyone will be successful in generating new visitors and condominium purchasers to the Las Vegas market, MGM Mirage has the resources and talent to do it with their CityCenter and Residences projects. You'd be very wise to look into the Project CityCenter highrises with great anticipation and get in on the interest list right now by contacting me immediately for more details.
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