Fontainebleau Las Vegas: Next Big Opening on the Strip?

Fontainebleau Las Vegas has been a long time coming. The shining blue glass megalith on the Las Vegas Boulevard has had more stops and starts than the traffic it shadows beneath it. But in Las Vegas, if you can dream it then it will eventually come to pass and the new resort and casino across from Resorts World is moving fast to open its doors to an ever-increasing demand for such bookings late next year. 

Fontainebleau Development, a designer, builder, owner, and operator of premier hospitality, commercial, retail, and luxury properties, is revealing the first details for the new luxury retail experience to debut within Fontainebleau Las Vegas, the company’s highly anticipated luxury resort destination on the Las Vegas Strip. As momentum builds toward a winter of 2023 opening, after almost 70 years since the company’s founding, Fontainebleau Development is embracing the property’s unique integrated design to create a shopping district that will span 90,000 square feet and feature approximately 35 luxury retail concepts across two levels.

“Fontainebleau Las Vegas’ unique vertical design gives us great creative flexibility when it comes to our retail space,” says Fontainebleau Development President Brett Mufson. “We’re incorporating other elements of the Fontainebleau brand into our space, making for a seamless guest experience and generating unprecedented exposure and foot traffic for our retail partners.”

The Fontainebleau Las Vegas resort shopping district is conveniently connected and highly visible from the larger resort ecosystem, as every space will be designed with accessibility top of mind – neighboring, either adjacent or above, Fontainebleau’s 173,000-square-foot casino, dining experiences, and other offerings.

The hotel’s recent history begin in 2005 when a Florida developer, acquired the 1950s-era Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach and unveiled plans for the one on Las Vegas Boulevard that same year. Building started in 2007 but quickly ran into a wall during the real estate mega-crash the next year. The project ended in bankruptcy in 2009.

Not to let a good Las Vegas hotel resort project go bad, however, billionaire Carl Icahn took over the unfinished resort in 2010 for a mere $150 million, only to keep it parked until the economy recovered and he could sell it for yet another fortune. That happened in 2017 when developer Steve Witkoff acquired the tower for $600 million and teamed up with Marriott to build up the property and connect it by new transportation modes to the Las Vegas Convention Center, which was seeing nearly seven million people a year coming into Las Vegas for conferences alone. 

The resort then became Drew Las Vegas a year later and work on it went at a steaming pace toward a 2022, but all work was suspended in March 2020 as Las Vegas quickly shut down in the wake of COVID. Once again, the building became a battleground for creditors and lawsuits. But in a strange twist of fate, the original visionaries from Miami Beach reacquired the ever-unfinished Fontainebleau Las Vegas in February 2021 – only this time in partnership with the insidious conservative political machine that is also Koch Industries.

Again, the building missed its targeted opening date last fall, but noted it would feature more than 3,700 rooms along with restaurants, shops, nightlife and other amenities, including a pillarless conference and ballroom spanning more than 105,000 square feet that can be split into 57 breakout rooms.

The new opening goal of 2023 will close an 18-year journey for the beleaguered property, or test its destiny once more to remain a towering testament the city’s footprint as an ever unfinished jewel in the desert.