My Slippery Slope to Entitled Asshole: Turning 40 at The Villas at The Mirage

The number of original Roger Thomas interiors commercially available in Las Vegas currently sits at just 23. Now retired from decades of creating Steve Wynn’s most extraordinary spaces, Thomas’s rooms are an increasingly endangered accommodation requiring travel to Macau or Boston to readily stay in one. In Vegas, eighteen of them are locked down for Wynn’s most premium players and the other five are for people obsessed enough to justify paying several thousands per night. I fall among the latter.

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Nick Papa2.0: The Renovated Lanai at The Villas at The Mirage

This review is dedicated to the memory of my friend, Alan Reed, an even bigger Vegas fan than I. The Mirage was his favorite property and I would learn at his memorial that he spent his final night in his favorite city in one of these suites.

In the late 90s, my family and I would take a two-car caravan to Las Vegas once or twice per year. We’d almost exclusively stay crammed between a couple rooms at Luxor and Dad would occasionally splurge upgrading one to a Pyramid Corner suite. At 590 square feet, teenaged me felt like a king luxuriating under the slanted windows in a hot tub that—perhaps thankfully—always smelled overwhelmingly of bleach. At home, early stages of the internet meant that I could peruse tiny gifs of fancy suites before a landline call interrupted my hotel fantasies loading at dial-up speeds. Read More