Dial M for...Magnificent!

Heather and I do our best to check out all of the latest and greatest projects in town. While our list for field trips is actually quite long right now, we were able to make it out to the new M Resort while meeting with a new client who lives in the area.

One of the greatest things about this casino/hotel is that it is transparent in so many ways. When you drive past the building at night, you can see through it. When you're walking through the casino, you can see through everything, into all of the restaurants, down to the pool and even out to views of the strip. It feels so open, light and airy. We are in love with the new trend in casino design. Gone are the low popcorn ceilings, smoky poker rooms and artificial lighting everywhere.

The craps tables. Love the giant light fixture.

And speaking of the pool....

There's a great spot at the north end of the pool - it's a huge stage for outdoor concerts. I can't wait to see who is going to be there this summer!

It's such a sexy little hotel



There are some pretty cool restaurants and we have only heard great things about every single one of them.

This is the Hostile Grape. Since we were visiting in the middle of the day and most of the restaurants don't open until 5:00, we weren't able to go inside. This is probably a good thing since it is a wine cellar/bar/tasting room. There are about 160 wines that can be sampled by using pre-paid tasting cards. It's just unfortunate that this place is 43 miles from our office. We're hoping to go back once we find a driver. Volunteers, anyone?

This is the restaurant at the top of the hotel, Veloce Cibo. The word on this place is that the food is DELICIOUS and super reasonable. Check out the menu here.

A view of the rooms

Another cool light fixture in one of the bars in the casino

Heather and I visited on a Tuesday at about 1:30 and the three restaurants that were open all had about a 30 minute wait time and there were a ton of people inside the casino. Economy schmenonomy - this place has already had to hire more people since its opening. They've definitely figured out the formula for success. Here are some other interesting facts about the resort:

• It has its own car wash and gas station. You can redeem your players points to pay for services
• There is an on-site pharmacy that also accepts players points as payment
• There is a demonstration kitchen that hosts TV and radio shows
• The buffet price includes beer and/or wine

So that's the end of our free promo for the M Resort. It's just exciting to see something innovative and architecturally beautiful, especially right now when Chicken Little is ranting and raving about the sky falling all around us.

I'm a Barbie girl....

Heather and I are just finishing up a large residential design project and one of the girl's rooms that we worked on was designed around these vintage Barbie prints.

We hung six of them over her headboard on top of an 11 foot wall of fabric. I can't wait to share the photos!

With our client's input, we decided on a chocolate brown and pink color scheme. It was like working on every girl's dream bedroom. Barbies, rhinestones, and lots of pink!

This fabric shows the sophisticated look we were going for and the color scheme. We didn't use this exact fabric, but we'll show you pics in the future with the fabrics we did use.

These are her nightstands

Nightstand lamps

Her desk

Desk chair

This is a large display cabinet where she can store her vintage Barbie collection

Some fun accessories

We'll post pictures of the finished room in the next few days. Stay tuned!

Drumroll please....

Here are some of the photos of the Barbie room that we promised. Please excuse the quality of the photos, we are adding some finishing touches before we have the rooms professionally shot.

We love the finish on the lamps - it is called chocolate chrome and is gorgeous in person. It is much more glamorous than a flat brown lamp and we didn't want to add another pink element. The back wall of the bedroom is shirred fabric from floor to ceiling. The ceilings are 12 feet high, so the result is very dramatic.

The pillows were super fun to design - we don't always have an opportunity to use rhinestones.

We did an extra full and puddled bedskirt to add to the luxurious feel of the room

This is the fabric on her large reading chair. It's a chenille so it is very comfortable and durable enough for the kids and/or dogs to jump all over it.

This is the ottoman for the reading chair. Again, we were able to use fabric with rhinestones sewn into it. Fantastic!

The drapery tieback

Some finishing touches

As I mentioned in the last post, Heather and I had so much fun designing this room. One of the benefits of being a designer is that we can live vicariously through our clients and give ourselves the dream rooms we never had.

We've got some more exciting photos from this project, keep watching for more photos in the coming weeks.