Wynn Las Vegas and Encore

The last effort from Steve Wynn, the Bellagio, was for a while if not the most over-the-top hotel in the world then at least the most over-the-top hotel this side of Dubai. No longer. What during construction seemed like an experiment designed to test the credulity of the rumor-mongerers — how many thousands of rooms, how many billions of dollars, how many years in the making — is now open, and apparently it came out even better than expected, because it was deemed excessive enough to be named for the man himself.

The Wynn, then, is everything it was rumored to be, and then some: 2,000-plus rooms, fifty floors, too many restaurants to name, a mall packed full of upmarket designer boutiques and luxury-goods brands, and a 2,000-seat theater hosting the obligatory can-you-top-this Vegas show, Le Rêve — The Dream, a water-based spectacle that's a bit like Broadway crossed with the Roman Colosseum, only with better seats and fewer gladiator fights. After that it gets absurd: a man-made mountain dotted with pine trees beside a three-acre lake, and we hear there are some sort of gambling facilities somewhere within, if you have the time for that sort of thing.

So yes, it's like nothing you've ever seen, at least in the sense that it's bigger, bolder, plusher and more expensively built than anything you've ever seen. In that sense it's worth a stay just for the novelty of it. But the Wynn also rewards a purer approach — resist the temptation to ironically distance yourself from all the fall-of-the-empire material excess and you just might find yourself uncomplicatedly reveling in the spaciousness of the rooms, the luxuriousness of the comforts, the views, good Lord, the views of the Strip at night, which is of course gaudy as all hell if you're thinking too hard, but if you're not, really rather beautiful in its own way.