Fontainebleau Las Vegas — Resort Tower

Fontainebleau Las Vegas finally opened on December 13, 2023, roughly 16 years after crews first broke ground on the blue-glass tower at the north end of the Strip. The 67-story, 737-foot resort holds 3,644 rooms and ranks among the tallest buildings in Nevada. Getting it open cost about $3.7 billion and outlasted the 2008 financial crisis, multiple owners, and a decade of stalled construction.

Project Scope
The project started in 2007, stalled in 2009 when financing collapsed, and sat as a shell for years before Fontainebleau Development and Koch Real Estate Investments revived it and pushed to the finish. W.A. Richardson Builders served as general contractor for the completion, with Carlos Zapata Studio as design architect and Bergman Walls & Associates as executive architect. KHS&S handled large interior and exterior finish packages across the tower and podium. The resort packs a casino, convention space, a theater, restaurants, and pool decks into the base below the guest floors. Work on the revived build ran from 2021 to the December 2023 opening.

Why It Matters
Few Strip projects have a history this rough. The tower stood unfinished long enough to become a symbol of the recession, and plenty of people doubted it would ever open under the Fontainebleau name. Bringing a 16-year-old structure up to current codes meant reworking systems that had aged in place and finishing a building designed under an earlier era’s standards. The completion filled a long-empty gap at the quieter north end of the Strip and gave that stretch a major anchor next to the Las Vegas Convention Center. For an industry that watched the shell sit idle for years, seeing the lights finally come on closed one of the longest-running construction sagas in Las Vegas history.

Project Team & Details