In addition to the cover story, my regular Green Felt Journal column in Vegas Seven this week tackles one very specific complaint about Aria’s casino, the lighting:
But the thing most likely to provoke comment from casino-goers about Aria in its first three months hasn’t been Pelli Clarke Pelli’s spacious design or the cutting-edge technology of the guest rooms. It’s that the casino is a bit on the dark side.
Pre-opening press releases hyped the airiness of the building: “Soaring open spaces, ranging from Aria’s three-story lobby to its guest rooms, fill with natural light and evoke breadth and freedom.” It wasn’t surprising that guests expected a casino that looked like an Apple Store lined with slots instead of MacBooks.
That’s not what they got.
“The casino is very nice but very dark,” a visitor from Texas recently wrote on Expedia. Others have been even harsher in their assessment of the lighting. “It’s way too dark, to the point of being forbidding,” commenter Mike P. said on the RateVegas blog.
This piece had an interesting evolution. Originally I wanted to borrow a light meter and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt (pardon the pun), that Aria was much darker than other casinos. Then both Bobby Baldwin and Bill McBeath conceded that the casino was too dark, so it rendered the entire exercise academic.
Still, measuring light levels would be an interesting project, maybe for another time.
And a few months ago when the Mandarin Oriental opened, I referenced the spot in front of the restrooms in the Sky Lobby being as dark as the caverns of Moria. Apparently they just hadn’t screwed in the lightblub in that corridor yet, because when I returned a few days later it was amply lit. So don’t go looking for Durin the Deathless at the MO–you won’t find him there.