Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas

Only in a city like Vegas could the Four Seasons' trademark elegance seem new and daring. Everyone's talking about the Vegas Renaissance. Yes, you can still get comped rooms, a six-dollar all-you-can-eat steak buffet (iceberg lettuce and Jell-O included) and sell your soul to the slots — but that's all downtown.

Now there's another Vegas, where Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten have replaced the bad spaghetti, you can take your children to the Cirque de Soleil, take a break in a top-notch spa, and stand agape at the unrivalled art collection of the Bellagio. Needless to say, the Four Seasons remains somewhat of an unidentified foreign object. The neighboring Bellagio and Mandalay Bay are still bright, noisy playgrounds. In contrast, the Four Seasons is a relatively small 424 rooms and five stories high, with restrained rooms and no casino. Bang in the center of the bustling Boulevard, it is the anti-Vegas.

The rooms are decorated in the style that we've come to associate with Four Seasons: Ralph Lauren red plush chairs, four-poster beds, and Bulgari toiletries in the bathroom. There's a fab American steakhouse and a Mediterranean restaurant, and a spa whose Javanese Lurlur treatment is to die for. But what's the point of going to Vegas if you're going to stay at the Four Seasons? Well, there are unobtrusive corridors connecting you to the hubbub of the much-touted Mandalay Bay — so you can get plenty of the showy non-stop entertainment for which this town is so famous. But when you want to escape you can duck back into those corridors and find yourself in a different place.

The pool is phenomenally peaceful — they'll spritz you with Evian and press cucumber slices to your eyes. And you have the thrill of walking into a Vegas hotel lobby that is absent of gaming tables and lights. Not only the lobby, but the entire hotel is quiet. Of course you can always open your windows and check on what you're missing.

For all this hype about Vegas becoming the next Riviera, Vegas and its hotels are still besotted with the excess that made the town famous. The Four Seasons is the only hotel with enough self-confident elegance to come close to a renaissance. If it were somewhere else, you might overlook it, but in the center of Vegas, it will just about blow your mind.

How to get there:
Four Seasons Resort Las Vegas is a 15-minute drive (3 miles) from McCarran International Airport.