H&S International And Rottet Studio Craft The Ideal Vegas Escape

No doubt this Las Vegas residence is a trophy house. No doubt it’s also stunning—both visually and statistically: 29,000 square feet, seven bedroom suites, six powder rooms plus a gym shower, and a bunk room that sleeps 10. In other words, something closer to a boutique hotel than a private home. Ostensibly no problem for hospitality doyenne, architect, and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Lauren Rottet. But therein lay the challenge. “I’ve always been fascinated by scale and proportion,” says the Rottet Studio founding principal and president. “I needed to achieve human-scale design and make this feel homey.” It was crucial that the massive, two-story house be equally welcoming to the owners—a couple with four young boys—their wide circle of friends, and the many guests they host at frequent events. Not a mere showplace for showy people, Rottet emphasizes, since the clients are anything but.

Architect Bing Hu brought Rottet onto the project, reprising their Arizona MidFirst Bank branch collaborations more than a decade earlier. The founding principal of H&S International had already designed multiple international residences for the clients. For this property, adjacent to a world-class golf course with sweeping views of the desert, mountains, and distant Vegas Strip, he embraced Frank Lloyd Wright’s ethos of “inside out,” conceiving interior and exterior as one. “Everything integrated, everything in sync,” Hu asserts. “That’s the beauty of why the architecture and interiors look so striking. It’s not just one thing or the other.” His challenge? Fitting the dense program within the limits of the building envelope.

Infusing A Vegas Home With Warmth

A paradigm of desert architecture, the low, sprawling structure is steel-framed and incorporates generous expanses of glass, despite Nevada’s blinding light and searing heat. “It’s something they know and understand,” Rottet says of the clients, who went to school in the area. Outside, sweeping stucco planes define the rectilinear form, complemented by a welcoming portico—its cantilevered construction and backward-canted columns suggesting motion. The movement theme continues in the entry hall, where a 26-foot-long chandelier of fritted tangerine glass undulates above a multileg bench by Rottet in Nero Marquina marble. “It’s sturdy enough for the boys to skateboard on,” she says with a laugh. The same sense of dynamism is expressed in the blackened-steel diagonals of the switchback stair that marks the transition into the vast great room.

Occupying roughly a quarter of the ground floor, the space comprises a large living area flanked by an open eat-in kitchen, fulfilling the “family first” dictum while serving as a convivial venue for entertaining. “The week after completion, they had a 100-person event, even moving in a stage,” Rottet reports. She managed the oversize scale by mapping out three rug-anchored seating groups furnished with commanding pieces. Back-to-back Antonio Citterio sectionals form the spine of the central vignette, facing the 9-foot-wide fireplace on one side and the kitchen on the other, while a pair of curvaceous Adam Court sofas each draws its own circle of comfortable armchairs. Under the space-defining rugs, the flooring is large-format, concrete-look porcelain tile—the durable bedrock of “a minimalist palette with quiet finishes,” as Rottet Studio senior designer Hannah Rae puts it. But those words hardly describe one showstopping item: a fire-engine-red grand piano, once owned by Elton John and now played by the lady of the house.

Showstopping Furnishings Take The Stage

Almost as attention-grabbing is the kitchen chandelier—globes suspended from swagged chains of chunky, topaz-yellow glass—above the sculptural black island, where breakfast and casual family meals are served at a cantilevered counter. Behind the kitchen, the entrance to the formal dining room is flanked by glass-walled wine cellars—one for red, one for white. Mirroring the symmetry, a 12-seat Hellman-Chang table is aligned on axis with a totemlike palm tree framed by the enormous window. The connection to the natural world continues symbolically overhead, where a ceiling cleft lined in gold leaf and fitted with color-changing LEDs glows like a molten-lava fissure, while a Paul Fleming installation transforms one wall into a spangled galaxy of cast-resin pucks. “Conceptually, it’s like being outside,” Rottet observes, “with the sky, a constellation, and nature surrounding you.”

The landscape even appears to enter the house as an internal garden beneath an enormous skylight. Enclosed by oak-slat screens, it becomes a Zen retreat of sand, rocks, a pair of small trees, and a monumental chair carved from a single block of marble. “It had to be craned in, which taught us about timing,” Rae remarks. An open gallery linking the sons’ bedrooms, playroom, study, and bunk room encircles the atrium’s second floor. Access is via the stair, its wall a complex composition of laminated glass and perforated oak veneer layered over a mirrored background that gives passersby fleeting glimpses of themselves. A similar playfulness animates the entertainment and relaxation spaces surrounding the garden on the ground floor, which include a home theater, golf simulator, and the gym. A large lounge accommodates a pool table, vintage arcade games, and other group diversions. Beyond a sliding barn-style door lies the cigar bar, glammed up with a charcoal-plaster ceiling inset with nickel-and-oak cove-lighting fixtures above a stool-lined counter that terminates in a large basalt boulder.

The same rock, in the form of a hand-chiseled tub backdropped by rough-hewn block columns, features in the main suite’s bathroom at the other end of the house. Counterpointing the ruggedness, smooth, brushed limestone clads the floor, walls, and vanity in the spalike space. All is serenity in the adjoining sleeping quarters, where the 23-foot ceiling is moderated by a soaring oak-slat canopy—impressive in scale yet cocooning in feel. But then the same could be said of the grand family home itself.

Walk Through The Home Designed By Rottet Studio and H&S International

H&S INTERNATIONAL: CLAUDIO MUNOZ WHITING; YEE WING YIU. ROTTET STUDIO: AMBER LEWIS; MICHAEL TREVINO. CREATIVE DESIGNS IN LIGHTING: LIGHTING CONSULTANT. BDS STRUCTURAL: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. PINNACLE ARCHITECTURAL MILLWORK: MILLWORK. OZZIE KRAFT POOLS: POOL CONSULTANT. DISCOVERY BUILDERS: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT
HOLLY HUNT: WHITE LOUNGE CHAIRS, DRINK TABLE (LIVING AREA). OKHA: CURVED SOFAS. ARKETIPO FIRENZE: BROWN LOUNGE CHAIRS. NORR11: SHEEPSKIN LOUNGE CHAIRS, OTTOMANS. GLAS ITALIA: GLASS COFFEE TABLES. EDELMAN: LEATHER PANELING. CC-TAPIS: FREEFORM RUG (LIVING AREA), RUGS (DINING ROOM, CIGAR BAR). FLEXFORM: SECTIONALS (LIVING AREA), BED (BEDROOM). TAI PING: ROUND RUGS (LIVING AREA), RUG (BEDROOM). ARCHETYPE GLASS: GLASS PANELING (STAIR WALL), CABINET FRONTS (STUDY). TRUEING STUDIO: PENDANT FIXTURE (KITCHEN). MOROSO: CHAIRS. BULTHAUP: WALL CABINETRY. LASVIT: CUSTOM CHANDELIER (FOYER). GMLIGHTING: RECESSED LINEAR FIXTURE. ROTTET COLLECTION: BENCH (FOYER), GLASS COFFEE TABLE (CIGAR BAR), SIDE TABLES (BEDROOM). HELLMAN-CHANG: TABLE, CHAIRS (DINING ROOM). FLOS: LINEAR CEILING FIXTURE (DINING ROOM), CEILING FIXTURES (ATRIUM). BEA INTERIORS DESIGN: CHAIR (ZEN GARDEN). NORMANN COPENHAGEN: CHAIRS (STUDY). MYHOME COLLECTION: SIDE TABLE (BUNK ROOM). RICH BRILLIANT WILLING: SCONCES. FENDI CASA: BARSTOOLS (CIGAR BAR). WALTER K.: ARMCHAIRS. JAMIE BECKWITH COLLECTION: PARQUET FLOORING. SOUTHWEST BOULDER & STONE: BASALT COLUMNS (BATHROOM). VISUAL COMFORT & CO.: PENDANT FIXTURES. THORNTREE SLATE: VANITY, FLOOR, WALL LIMESTONE. ROCHE BOBOIS: ARMCHAIRS (BEDROOM). GABRIEL SCOTT: PENDANT FIXTURES. THROUGHOUT KNOWN COLLECTION: OAK FLOORING. STONE SOURCE: PORCELAIN FLOOR TILE. BENJAMIN MOORE & CO.: PAINT.