Mix
Las Vegas
Patrick Jouin

Patrick Jouin creates a pair of spaces inspired by the natural, not just the artificial, spectacle of Las Vegas

© Thomas Duval

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By Clifford A. Pearson

Perched 43 floors above the streets of Las Vegas, Mix offers a rare commodity in the land of a million slots—views: of the glittering Strip, the desert, and the mountains beyond. While casinos spend huge sums of money creating internal universes where the sun never sets (or rises), Paris-based designer Patrick Jouin relished the chance to connect Mix to the spectacular world beyond the reach of air-conditioning.

Mix occupies the top floor of THEhotel, the boutique sister attached to the Mandalay Bay casino hotel. With a stylish clientele staying in the guest rooms below, and star chef Alain Ducasse in charge of the menu, Mix needed to be both edgy and sophisticated. Complicating matters further, the establishment is really two places—an upscale restaurant with 240 seats and a sprawling lounge with 300 seats. Although the two portions flow one into the other on the same level and share a 6,000-square-foot kitchen, each has its own bank of elevators and entry.

“The views from up there are spectacular, so I imagined Mix as a special place suspended between the desert and the sky,” says Jouin, who has worked with Ducasse on other projects, including Spoon at Chlösterli in Gstaad, Switzerland [Record, July 2004, page 140; archrecord.com] and Mix in New York City, which closed earlier this year. “Las Vegas is a big, crazy, fun kind of town, but everything is fake,” explains the designer. “I didn’t want to copy anything here. I wanted it to be an original.”

Jouin took advantage of the top-floor location by creating two expansive terraces—one for the lounge, the other for the restaurant—and wrapping the interior spaces with glass that descends most of the 35 feet from ceiling to floor.
He then gave each of the two major functional elements its own identity: one dark and mysterious, the other ethereal and elegant.

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Formal name of Project:
Mix

Location:
Las Vegas

Gross square footage:
16,000 sq. ft.

Owner:
Mandalay Development
Las Vegas
702 597 2914

Interior Designer:
Patrick Jouin
8 passage de la Bonne Graine
75011 Paris France
+ 33 1 55 28 89 20
www.patrickjouin.com