In a recent New Yorker, I profiled Roger Thomas, the head of design for Wynn Resorts. Thomas is a remarkably talented interior designer - he's received nearly every accolade in the field - but I was most interested in the way Thomas has reinvented the modern casino, creating lovely and relaxing spaces that encourage people to squander their cash. (I've long believed that success in Vegas requires an intimate understanding of human nature - it's not easy getting people to enjoy games that are stacked against them.) Here's the lede:

On a clear December afternoon, Roger Thomas was completing a four-month renovation of the high-limit slot-machine room at the Wynn Las Vegas resort. Three assistants trailed him as he ﬂitted around, scrutinizing details and shouting instructions. “We’ve got an hour until the ropes come down,” he yelled. “And we need more ﬂuﬀ now. We need it desperately.” The “ﬂuﬀ” consisted of ivy that he was using to hide the roots of a pair of giant agave cactuses. The cactuses framed a sizeable fountain that Thomas had designed. The center of the fountain was a colossal lotus ﬂower, made of eighteen gold-painted panels, illuminated by pink lights. Thomas had ﬁxed on a lotus-ﬂower motif for the room after a Japanese sculpture of the Buddha caught his eye at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Thomas, who is the executive vice-president of design at Wynn Resorts, Steve Wynn’s gambling and hotel company, had done the original design for the room only a few years before. He had been told to create a space for older male gamblers, and so he had ﬁlled the gaming area with overstuﬀed leather armchairs, heavy curtains, and dark mahogany panelling. “It was all very clubby,” he said. “A place for bourbon, testosterone, and cigars.” But the Wynn Casino Operations department monitors the returns of every gambling device in every Wynn casino, and the room’s yields were falling short. After some investigation, it became clear that the problem was a demographic one. Men weren’t playing these games; women were.

So Thomas redesigned the room. He created a wall of windows to ﬂood the slot machines with natural light. He threw out the old furniture, replacing it with a palette that he called “garden conservatory”—lime green, white leather, and gold. “I wanted it bright and shimmery and full of ﬂowers,” Thomas told me. “A place where a lady might feel comfortable.” Now every available surface appears to be covered in something expensive. There are Italian marbles and carpets designed by Thomas. Bowls of ﬂoating orchids are set on tables; stone mosaics frame the walkway; the ceiling is a quilt of gold mirrors. Thomas even bought a collection of antique lotus-ﬂower sculptures, which he placed near a row of blinking video-poker slots. “These gambling machines are basically big light ﬁxtures—they scream for attention—and so you normally don’t try to compete with them,” he said. “You design around them. But I wanted this room to be the opposite of every other slot room.”

Doing the opposite of what is usual has become Thomas’s trademark. Beginning with the Bellagio hotel, ﬁfteen years ago, he has reinvented the look of the modern gambling hall by deliberately violating every previously accepted rule of casino design. Since then, his interiors have been at the heart of Steve Wynn’s spreading empire, in hotels like the Wynn Las Vegas and the Wynn Macau. In a world of corporate hotels slouching towards similarity, Thomas’ designs insist on their uniqueness, and if anything are getting quirkier from year to year. His sketches for a resort still pending approval in Foxborough, Massachusetts, mix a basic hunting-lodge vocabulary of dark wooden beams and ﬁreplaces with a passion for eighteenth-century France and fuchsia tones. “I don’t do focus groups,” Thomas told me. “I create rooms that I want to be in.”

Steve Wynn’s Vegas hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, ﬁve-star approach to a desert city previously known for cheap buﬀets and strip clubs. But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself, creating spaces that allow people to enjoy the act of losing money, and encouraging them to lose even more.