Rolling out the Carpet for Homo Ludens

Bill Friedman, the sage of casino management, spent twenty years trying to figure out why some gambling halls are empty and others full. “The only variable that differed,” he concludes in Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, “was interior design.” In today’s Las Vegas, the aesthetic of excess that characterized the megahotels of the ’90s is losing favor. When the MGM Grand opened its doors in 1993, visitors followed a “yellow brick road” carpet from the entrance to the slots, perhaps unconsciously humming “If I Only Had a Brain.” Fifteen years later, with the age of heavily themed design in decline, the casino’s carpets have been reduced to a pattern composed almost entirely of reddish hues and interlocking arabesques, the signature lion’s head silhouette barely rising to the fore, no broomstick or ruby slippers to be seen.

In the so-called sawdust joints of the ’40s and ’50s, floors were for cigarette ash, dust, and vomit. The owners of the Last Frontier (which later became the New Frontier, then simply the Frontier) went as far as hauling an antique bar from Gold Rush–era San Francisco and procuring a lavish collection of animal horns from around the world, but never thought to cover the floors. But the days of cowboy boots sinking into soiled wood shavings were numbered: World War II ended, the Flamingo opened, and Vegas was glamorous—and more to the point, carpeted, the floors blanketed in newly invented synthetic fibers and lustrous faux-Orientals.

The decorative phase that spanned the end of the Vietnam era to the dawn of the Clinton years can be compared to the stupid glee experienced by a child who has just been given a 124-count box of Crayolas with Mauvelous and Purple Pizzazz. (The crimes committed against color in this period would find their apotheosis in the fuchsia and aquamarine floral nightmare plastered to the floors of the old Mirage—a pattern only Don Johnson could love.) The payoff? Vegas became the entertainment capital of the world, a meretricious emblem of the American century’s zenith. Realtors and merchandising associations brought their conventions to Treasure Island and New York, New York (Giuliani’s program of sanitization had yet to convince them), and even the Europeans came in droves, following Baudrillard across the Atlantic to the land “where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value.”

Refuges of simulation remain: at the Hotel Paris, a vast field of flowers carpeted in the impressionist style still leads visitors through a Giverny of video poker and complimentary mai tais. But hotels and casinos are increasingly looking to trade gimmickry for packaged elegance, starting with the carpets. Oddly, many of the new floor-coverings feature forms and figures that...