Transcript of interview with Lee Cagley by Claytee D. White and Stefani Evans, August 08, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH LEE CAGLEY An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editors: Stefani Evans, Franklin Howard Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans, Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the University for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE Lee Cagely, an interior designer and professor who designed some of the most iconic hotels in Las Vegas, Nevada, was born in the Panama Canal Zone on January 31, 1951. His father Leo was a civil engineer for the Panama Canal Company and his mother Charlotte worked as a receptionist. After his father left his job in Panama, Lee spent his childhood in Dallas, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Des Moines, Iowa. He started to attend Rice University for architecture, but he chose to leave before completing his degree. He returned to college a few years later and graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in interior design in 1975. While his first California jobs were in restaurant design, he quickly moved on to airports and hotels and moved to Las Vegas in 1990 after associating with Marnell Architecture. Cagley is known for his designs in the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, Ceasars Palace Atlantic City, the Mirage, and the Bellagio Resort & Casino. He is currently Chair of the Iowa State University College of Design and is principal designer for Lee Cagely Design. Here, Cagley explains the importance of keeping the various pieces of the infrastructure of a resort—including landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, all kinds of HVAC [heating, v ventilation and air conditioning] concerns, housekeeping, food service, maintenance, etc.—invisible in order to maximize the visitor experience. At the same time he illustrates through several examples how resort design does not happen in a vacuum—it is instead part of a complex team that works together to create the whole. He also describes the challenges the Las Vegas resort industry finds in creating the very best visitor experience for a broad range of groups—from Millennials to their Boomer grandparents and all the generations in between. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Lee Cagley August 8, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface………………………………………………………………..……………………………...……..iv Lee discusses his birth and his parents’ work in the Panama Canal Zone; moved to Texas, Oklahoma, and Iowa during his childhood; attended Rice University; attended Iowa State University of interior design; designed restaurants and airports; moved to Las Vegas; explains design concepts for fast food restaurants and casino carpeting; designed the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino and Ceasars Palace Atlantic City; describes working for Steve Wynn; explains the concepts of interior design and his design process; recalls the design process for the Bellagio Resort & Casino; explains the use of smells in hotel interior design………...……………………………………………………………………………………….…1-14 Lee recalls some of his favorite design projects; discusses the changing design trends in Las Vegas, Nevada; explains the uses of lighting in casinos; discusses the future of Downtown Las Vegas and how to design it for Millennials; explains the impact of generational differences on interior design and how to design for different generations in one building…………………………………………………….…14-24 Lee describes his work with students at Iowa State University to design new combat outpost for American troops; explores the use of interior design as means to address social problems and the impact of space on daily life; discusses the design of the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome; explains design choices for Lucky Dragon Las Vegas; discusses importance of Las Vegas for his design students……………………...24-35 1 Today is August 8, 2016, and we're in Summerlin with Lee Cagley. This is Claytee White and Stefani Evans. Lee, could you pronounce and spell your first and last names, please? I sure can. My name is Lee Cagley. It's C-A-G-L-E-Y. And first name? First name is Lee, L-E-E. Thank you. Why don't we begin by you can tell us a little bit about your early life; where you were born? Sure. I was born in the Panama Canal Zone. My father was a civil engineer. My mother and father were both from Iowa. One of his lifelong dreams had been to be in some way involved with the Panama Canal. He got an undergraduate degree from Iowa State and a master's from Harvard and about that time he had met my mom. She was a Midwest gal. I mean she was just not particularly interested in heading to Panama. My father took a job. He was very, very lucky. He was able to get a position with the Panama Canal Company and he spent two years sending her little scrapbooks, little pictures, black and white pictures, trying to get her to come back to join him in Panama. She would say, "You know, I'm fine; I'll just have a job; I'll stay." Fortunately, for me he finally talked her into it. They were there I think twelve years. There's a secondary reservoir that collects rainwater and feeds it into the Chagres River, which then makes the canal work. He was there to help design that. But when my brother was born in 1956—and I was born in 1951—when my brother was born, they decided it was time to come to the United States. Actually, it turned out that they were concerned about education and they thought that it would be better if I was in the United States. That wasn't true. The schools actually in the [Panama] Canal Zone were, but we didn't know that. 2 So we moved to Dallas, Texas. My dad had a job as a civil engineer. He worked for Clint Murchison, the guy that among other things owned the [Dallas] Cowboys [football team] at the time. He did heavy-earth moving contracting construction work. They were working on the interstate highway system. I was there as a kid through sixth grade, and then in seventh and eighth grade we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My dad was only there for a short period of time and had made friends with some people in Iowa, Mr. Green, the Green Construction Company, the people that built the Alaskan Highway and the Alaska Pipeline and a lot of highways and dams across the country. That's where my parents moved. They moved to Des Moines to be back with family and so forth and so on. So I spent high school—ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade—in Des Moines, Iowa. I wanted to be an architect. So when I graduated from Roosevelt [High School], I applied for a number of different schools and we went all over looking at schools, but we settled on Rice University. I went to Rice as an architect and I was there for two and a half years and it didn't work out. It turned out to be a fantastically expensive school. We had a certain amount of money set aside for education and all of that went up in smoke after about the first year and a half that was supposed to last for four. So anyway, I left Rice and went to work briefly in Des Moines [Iowa]. Moved to Omaha [Nebraska], took a job as a store fixture designer. Moved to Charleston, South Carolina to work for a chain of jewelry stores down there. And eventually decided that I really wanted to be an interior design person and started interviewing for jobs like that and found out that without registration you can't get a job in the industry. The only way for me to get registration was to go back to school and get a degree in interior design. So my parents graciously allowed me to claim residency in Des Moines and I went to Iowa State and I graduated in 1975, I think, or [19]76—seventy-five [1975]. I have to say I got a great 3 education and I loved the school. I took a job in Los Angeles [California]. I drove to L.A. and started actually restaurant design. I started out in fast food design. I got a job with a company that does—or did do interior finishes and furnishings for McDonalds and for Burger King and for Foodmaker, which is Jack in the Box and some other things. It was a great education. I thought it was going to be horrible, but it was a lot of fun. You had to make decisions quickly. Whenever a job came in the door...We would receive them on a Monday. There were about twenty of us in the design department. You had to come up with a concept, do physical drawings and specifications, price it, budget it, and send it out by Friday. It taught us to make quick decisions and to make effective decisions. Interestingly enough, as far as I know, the ones that I've track of, of the twenty people that were in that design department, all of them either ended up owning their own company or being the head of a design department in some other company, all of us, and we all started out flipping burger joints. I loved it. Good training. But for me the lesson that I tell the students now is your first job isn't necessarily going to be your last job, but you need to learn from every job regardless of what the job is. So I got a job after that working for a company, Denis Allemand and Associates in Los Angeles that specialized in airport facilities and hotels and spent a number of years with Danny traveling around the country working on airports. I worked on LAX [the Los Angeles International Airport]. I worked on Boston [International Airport]. I worked on lots and lots of airports all over the country doing gift shops, working on public spaces, working on adjacent hotels. Host International facilities as well, we did a lot of work with them. So eventually when Marriott bought them, we did a lot of work for Marriott. 4 A friend who had been in that company had left and gotten a job with Tamarind in Los Angeles that specialized in casino design. I got a phone call—I'm going to say about 1982 or three, somewhere around there; yes, [19]83, Tamarind—asking if I'd be interested in coming to work for them for casino design. They were working on a number of facilities in Atlantic City [New Jersey]. I worked on Caesars Palace in Atlantic City and a couple of ancillary jobs back in Atlantic City and also in Las Vegas [Nevada]. Eventually I left there. I went to work at General Growth Properties, which, again, has a number of shopping centers around. In fact, General Growth has several here, but at that time I was working with General Growth in Southern California out of Sherman Oaks [California], out of their property there. Then Tamarind came and asked me—they called again and said, "Would you be interested in coming back to work for us? We really would like to have you working with us again to do restaurant and gaming design." When I went back to work for them, it turned out that our main client, even though we were working in Los Angeles, was Tony Marnell for Marnell Corrao Associates, at that time. Mel Steinberg, who was one of the two principles of Tamarind, was planning on retiring. He never told anyone any of this stuff. But one day when I was working—it was about 1989—we were working on the Rio [All-Suite Hotel and Casino] and Mel met me in Las Vegas on a Thursday and it was in January of 1990. He said, "Tomorrow, Friday is going to be your last day." I went, "What?" He said, "Yes, I'm sorry, but we're retiring and we thought about it. Tommy and I are going to close up the company and tomorrow is your last day. But the good news is that if you're interested, Mr. Marnell will bring you on Monday." And so I lived in Los Angeles. I had a condo. I had a lot of property. And I thought, well...But then I thought about it again and I thought, I've been working with these people for a 5 while and I really liked them. So I agreed. That following Monday for about four months, three months, four months, I flew back and forth. Finally on April Fool's Day [April 1] 1990, I moved here. I held onto that condo for another three years because I was convinced that I was never going to want to live here permanently. Who would want to live in Las Vegas? Oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? There's no way. There's nothing here. It's desert. It's dry. But they were willing to pay me and there was plenty of work, plenty of work. CLAYTEE: So before you start talking about Marnell, I want to know more about the concept, the thinking, the colors and everything for fast food design, getting those in and out and then how that transitioned you to your next thing. More than anything there were several things that had to happen. We did a lot of fast food work around the country. That was at a time when McDonalds and Burger King were trying to maintain a corporate identity but also to make each facility reflect to a certain extent the context it was sitting in, the city in which it was located. There was a McDonalds that Greg and I worked on in Boston on Boston Street that was really expensive. It was really elaborate, beautifully thought through. Again, once that kind of went through, then a number of these other folks that I would go to work with, whether it was in Upstate New York or, golly, Washington, D.C.—I went all over the country—you'd get there at the beginning of the week, take photographs, do some study. At that time, of course, there wasn't an Internet. I did a lot of work researching whatever the context was in the city. So if it was downtown, for example, there'd be some major feature or some point of pride. In the case of Philadelphia [Pennsylvania], obviously the Liberty Bell, the project that we worked on was really close to there, so American history. Trying to put things in context was really helpful later here because in Las Vegas we've tried to invent context. We didn't have a context. So we kind of made it up. For me that as 6 background training was really helpful. Also, fast food, like gaming, your attention is on other stuff. So at least back in the nineties or in the eighties you had to work really hard to get people to notice it, and the same thing is true for gaming, right? You're concentrated in a small square footage on eating a food, eating your lunch, breakfast or dinner quickly. So for me to get your attention, I've got to do a lot of stuff that normally wouldn't be the case in a regular restaurant. The same thing is true for gaming, I'm focused on that machine or a gaming table. So to get something to register you need to be bigger than life even for small details. So that's why the ugly carpeting? That's why? The carpeting? In? A lot of casinos have the ugliest carpeting I've ever seen. We work really hard on that. We work really hard. It's not so much now, but it used to be that the patterns were designed to hide shards or little bits of paper because people would buy a roll of quarters to feed the machine and they'd just tear them apart and then that paper all hit the floor. So we had to design carpet so that those little bits of paper would disappear. I never would have thought of that. I would have thought of spilled drinks or something like that. That too. Cigarette burns. We had a lot of dotted backgrounds on carpet. Ah, black dots. Yes. But one of the instructors that I had at Iowa State [University] who I really loved taught us how to design fabric and to work with repeat patterns. So some of the carpeting, again, once you start getting much, much bigger facilities, the carpeting becomes...You see a lot more of it. And so 7 we had to work with much bigger repeats so that it didn't look like it was spot, spot, spot, spot, spot. It's fairly tricky. There are still some dogs out there, I'll tell you. There is some amazingly bad carpet. But the good news is that almost without exception it only lasts about five to eight years and then they have to replace it. I guess so with the traffic. Traffic is unbelievable. So I'm ready for Marnell. So anyway, that's how I got here. So you were going to stay. You were going to stay to complete just the first job with Marnell, which was? I don't know. The first project that I was finishing up was Caesars Palace in Atlantic City and it involved, among a lot of other stuff, a life-size reproduction of a statue of David. Because Caesars Palace in Atlantic City was sort of Art Deco themed, which made no sense with a statue of David, my first job with them was to design like an Art Deco jukebox-shaped huge space that had the statue of David in it. And the life-size statue actually is really quite a tall statue. So in order to make it work within the casino, they actually had to sink it slightly, which put...right at eye level. Well, how interesting. And was that the original plan? That definitely was not the original plan. No one really realized that was going to be the result until it actually got installed and the minute it was installed they were like, oh gosh. Now what? They just let it go. They let it go. But I called my folks up and I said, "You imagine this. I went to Rice as an architect and Iowa State as an interior designer and here I am in my job and what I'm doing is just designing a giant forty-foot tall Art Deco jukebox with a statue of David in it. My 8 mom could not stop laughing. I said, "It's a living." Classically trained. Yes. But I never thought I would have a mash-up with those two things in the same space. Do you have photographs of that? I don't. Interestingly enough, I went back to get them and it's been remodeled. Oh, what a shame. When Atlantic City first went in, you had an elevated perimeter walkway that whenever—the gaming was not allowed to be twenty-four hours and they had to have a way that would close down the casino from the rest of the hotel and the rest of the resort. And so there was an elevated walkway and the statue of David was in that. That was how they managed...It was up and then they could sink it. But once twenty-four-hour gaming went in, they tore all that stuff out because they didn't want people to go upstairs and then downstairs and go through all that nonsense. So it's gone. That's too bad. No, it's really not too bad. It was not my best work, let's just put it that way. So after the David episode, then what? Well, we worked on a number of facilities here in Las Vegas. I've worked on for Mr. Marnell obviously the Rio; that was his pet project over quite a few years, and I headed the design department at Marnell for the interior design for all of those expansions from the first little tower, the first leg to the second leg and that whole new tower. It was quite a facility expansion. Then the Palazzo suites and all those villas and things like that. In the meantime, we worked on a lot of other facilities for Boyd and for the other folks in town as well, for Steve Wynn. What projects did you work on for Steve Wynn? Nothing that ever actually got installed. By that time Roger, which was Atlandia Design, got 9 absorbed into Wynn [Resorts, Limited]. And so we did a lot of study work, for example, for Encore [Las Vegas] and for some parts of Wynn [Las Vegas], but that was just done as sort of consulting work. Once they sold off a lot of their facilities, we worked on Bellagio [Resort & Casino], we worked on a number of projects for them for MGM [Grand Las Vegas], quite a few. So I want to know what an interior designer actually—what you actually do. So Bellagio is my favorite place. So how did you do that lobby? What does an interior designer do? Who comes up with those concepts for that ceiling and that garden? How is all of that done? Now, the original portion of the hotel, which was done by Roger Thomas. Roger works in close collaboration with DeRuyter Butler, who was the architect who was the head of the architecture site for Wynn. But it works the same way for all of us, in that nobody works in a vacuum. No one walks in and says, "I'll do this, this and this." It's a collaborative effort. Casinos in particular are incredibly complicated devices between security and all of the various sort of invisible infrastructure that has to service the people who are actually in it. The goal is for none of that to be obvious, but obviously it's also got to be effective. But on top of that Las Vegas was built on the idea that if I'm coming here as a customer there's a possibility I could be rich or there's a possibility that I could be richer. It also almost immediately morphed into it gives me an opportunity—when I come to Las Vegas, I have permission to misbehave, but I also have permission to be someone else. So it gives me an opportunity to try on alternate lifestyle. Getting a consistent lifestyle to happen in each of those different facilities is actually really tricky and isn't something that one person really does. It takes a team to make that all work—landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, all kinds of HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] concerns. Heating, ventilating and air-conditioning has to be extraordinary because people smoke and we don't want it to smell like it. Just lots and lots of little very important but sort 10 of segmented tasks. So when I walk into...Let's use the Bellagio for example. I walk in the front door from the valet parking, say. As I go in tell me how these invisible infrastructures are working to create the environment I'm in and to shape the first impression I have. Well, one of the best things about working with Steve Wynn—and if you've had a chance to talk with Roger or if you're going to, he'll underscore that—Steve, because of his approach, he's one of the few clients that we have ever worked with that will say, "Okay, I walk in the door. How do I feel?" That's his question. It's not, what do I see? It's, how do I feel? Then, "What have you done to make me feel that way? Then I take ten steps; now how do I feel? I take fifteen steps more; how do I feel? How far do I have to go before you change the way that I feel?" For me that's fantastic. That's a really great client. Interior design is all about manipulating space in a way that makes you change your perception of space. That's what interior design is about. Hopefully we want to change it for the better. We want you to feel better about being in a place. But there's lots of tricks that can be engaged in making you feel different about in a space. One of the best ones that you'll see, for example, at Encore, especially at Wynn—Wynn does a better job than Encore—but is layered light within the space. There's lighted ceilings. There's chandeliers. There's cove lighting. There's also down lighting. There's other things around the perimeter that are lit. And there's lamps or lanterns, for example, those shades that hangover the gaming tables. Those have the cameras in them, but they are also a source of light. What happens is when you walk into that space, it feels like the volume of air itself has light. It changes the way that you perceive that space. It's not things in a space that are lit; it's a lighted space. So you feel more a part of that environment and it's warmer, it's more friendly, it's more user friendly, but also there's this really subtle way that it changes the volume of space and it makes it feel more 11 alive. What about colors? Again, you're competing against a slot machine or a table. So the colors are brighter. That coupled with the fact that Steve has retinitis pigmentosa; it means that for him the colors have to be more intense anyway. But it just turns out that that's what gamers want to do anyhow. From our standpoint—again, every now and then you'll see—I can't think who the last people were who tried it here—someone comes in and wants an all-white casino and it just flops. They don't work. It just doesn't happen. It's really hard to be beautiful and discrete and modern and svelte and still have all this stuff, this visual activity going on. Everything else falls flat. So how do you make me feel richer? We give you a variety of ways for that to happen. One, it deals with your hotel room. You get a bigger room here for less money than you will anywhere else in America. You'll almost always get a marble bathroom. One of the early things that we were working on when we were working on Caesars Palace...There's a lot of not gold in Caesars, but if it's down at touch level, it's marble; it's real. They want you to feel the same way that a doge would in old Venice [Italy]; that you walk through and people say hello to you. To a certain extent, I mean if you're even a small scale player, you'll pick up a casino host and almost instantly people start noticing you or will know you by name and a cocktail waitress will come back and ask, "Would you like the same drink again?" Or whatever. All of that just goes to peoples' heads. We also try and make interiors feel more glamorous. So there is more sparkling surfaces. There's just a variety of different ways that you can do that, mosaic floors instead of glass floor or just marble floors so that they glitter when you walk past. There's that whole fantasy that I'm in this special place and it's because of me, they like me. Yeah. 12 The trick is we want you to feel good about the experience, and the subtext of that is we want you to feel good about losing money. We don't want you to make a lot of money and leave. Well, we do, but we want you to come back and lose what you won. To make people feel good about losing money requires meeting a lot of their needs whether they know it or not. So, for example, in hotel rooms, laying out the furniture in a way so that if they get up in the middle of the night, they don't nick their shins on the side of a coffee table. Or if I want to call room service at three in the morning, how far do I have to reach in order to hit the phone? How far do I have to reach in order to turn a light on? Can I have someone come in and give me food or bring something up without invading my privacy? Now, what about the smells that the casinos pump into the air? A lot of the casinos abandoned that—some still do—because it turns out a lot of us are allergic to perfume. I noticed it particularly at ARIA [Resort and Casino]. It always smelled like suntan lotion or something. Yes, coconut oil. Again, they've toned that down quite a bit. Steve started that I think, pumping signature scent in The Mirage because it was supposed to feel tropical. So they had this sort of citrusy, coconutty thing going in. Bellagio had a signature scent for a while. But it's expensive and it's really hard to do because in order to keep people from smelling cigarette smoke, you have to dump conditioned air. You have to move so much air out of a casino that any scent you put in goes out with it. So you're competing with cigarettes to see which is going to smell the most. Interesting. So what was the signature scent supposed to do? Well, it was a perfume. No, it was just to give the place a scent. To make it feel richer or to evoke a— 13 To evoke a—right. If my place smells like, say, a classic perfume of one sort or another, Chanel No. 5 or whatever, if it smells something—for a guy it would be a place that smelled either like his wife or his mistress or girlfriend or whatever. I mean you're trying to evoke sense memory. You're just trying to make something like that happen, to make me experience it in a way that cements the experience as being complete. It's really more important and it has been more important for a long time to get rid of the cigarette smell than it is to try and get that perfume smell in. Who do you think is doing the best job of that, which of the properties? I know that there are a couple of properties where I can almost see someone blowing smoke in my face and I really can't smell it. Right. Almost all of them. Any of the bigger ones. Any of the MGM, Mirage, or any of the Wynn properties. In order to get it to not smell like cigarettes, you have a very short time frame to get that air out before it settles, and if it does the particulates in the air will settle on stuff, it will settle in the carpet, it will settle in the ceiling, it will settle on the plants. So you have to keep moving it out. Generally they dump conditioned air into, for example, their back-of-house areas or the kitchens or whatever in order to dump it quickly and keep moving it. Usually they use it to cool the kitchen areas. But you have to move an enormous amount of air in order to do that. I think they all do a pretty good job. So that's the HVAC. Those guys are the unsung heroes of Las Vegas in my view. So how do they do that? It's a physical matter of moving air. It's a problem that can be solved pretty easily. So it's an engineering thing. Exactly. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. 14 Now, I've noticed—again, it's Bellagio—that with all the draping over the casino tables, all that fabric; and, yet, it doesn't seem to get— That gets changed quite a bit. Oh, does it? Yes. All of that has a fabric treatment on it that's a Nano-Tex finish, which means that it's repellant to a lot of different things. But even so, again, if you move the air quickly, you can keep that from happening. They clean it. Those fabric canopies just like they have fabric canopies at the Wynn and to a certain extent those drapery panel things that happen at the Encore, all of that's got to be cleaned and replaced on a regular basis to keep it fresh. Just that's how it is. What is your favorite job that you've done in Las Vegas? One of your favorites or your most— Which child do you like the most? Yes. Okay, so let me change the question. When you go back now, which are you most impressed by? I liked working at Bellagio. We worked on the expansion at Bellagio. We did their presidential suites. We did their high limit gaming area. That, for me, was a lot of fun. Well, we spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it as well as money. We had thirteen thousand square feet and thirteen million dollars. We had a thousand dollars a square foot to spend on that. It's gorgeous even now, years later. A property that we worked on in Perth, Australia, for Crown Gaming was also a favorite of mine. And I would say that we worked on The Villas at The Mirage and I loved that. That was really nice. I liked working on those villas because when MGM first took over The Mirage, they remodeled it and they took a lot of the fun, sort of tiki hut stuff out of it and tried to modernize it. It 15 lost a lot of character, I think. When they came to us and asked us if we would help with some of The Villa redesign, I wanted to take it back to that, to modernize it, but to take it back to the same basic idea, which was white with bright colors, and they owned this sort of tropical paradise. Those villas are really lovely and they're not on the building; they're actually on a separate little building way out on the side of the property. So they're very private. That was a lot of fun as well. Did they allow you to take them back to where they...? Yes. Actually it was a struggle. At that time everything in Las Vegas wanted to be brown. I asked them—we kept doing—there was this sort of cycle, which is like when ARIA first opened up. The whole casino, everything in the casino was brown. Brown is the new black. It was dark, I remember. Yes, intentionally. For us, I just really liked the idea that The Mirage could feel like it was pristine and festive and bright and tropical, and it had this kind of innocence to it that didn't feel heavy or lugubrious.