Years after imploding Las Vegas hotel, developer still wants to build luxury resort

A decade after he imploded the Clarion hotel, developer Lorenzo Doumani is still pursuing plans for a luxury resort in its place.

Doumani set out years ago to build the Majestic hotel near the Las Vegas Strip but has yet to start construction. He now aims to break ground in March on the first phase, a two-story retail plaza, he said in a recent interview.

He plans to open that section in spring 2027, and once he does, he would start building the 604-room hotel. Construction of the roughly 50-story tower would last about two years, he said.

Doumani, whose family built the long-gone La Concha and El Morocco motels on the Strip, said that his prior approvals for Majestic expired and that the envisioned resort is now “quite a bit different” than it used to be.

Majestic was previously slated to cost around $850 million and feature 35 corporate suites, offered for sale from $10 million to $100 million, spread among the tower’s top 10 floors.

However, Doumani said construction costs on the project soared by 30 percent, and he scrapped the suites. This shaved around 250,000 square feet, saving about $200 million, he said.

Vegas history

Overall, his 6-acre project site on Convention Center Drive, near the north Strip, has been quiet for years but has a far-from-boring past.

The former hotel there had a history marked by ownership and name changes, bankruptcy and foreclosure proceedings, and fizzled redevelopment ideas. At one point, even the former World Wrestling Federation owned the hotel and laid out plans for a wrestling-themed casino but never built it and sold the site.

Eventually, Doumani bought the 12-story hotel, then called the Clarion, in 2014. He imploded it in early 2015, but even that didn’t go as planned.

Part of an elevator shaft survived the blasts and had to be pulled down with steel cables.

In spring 2019, Clark County commissioners approved Doumani’s plans for a 45-story, 720-room nongaming hotel. He aimed to break ground in spring 2020, but soon enough, the coronavirus pandemic upended daily life and wreaked havoc on Las Vegas’ tourism-dependent economy.

He held a news conference at the site on Jan. 6, 2021 — the same day that rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency — to discuss his plans for the resort.

He hoped to break ground that summer or early fall. He later pushed the groundbreaking to 2022 but said he was still on track to complete Majestic in late 2024.

But he didn’t start building the resort, and his project approvals eventually expired, county records show.

‘Rat Pack kind of vibe’

The Clark County Commission gave the green light to his redesigned resort in May.

Doumani said he couldn’t get bring the project to the board sooner because it took 10 months to secure Federal Aviation Administration approval of the hotel height.

In a statement, the FAA attributed the delay primarily to new evaluation criteria.

Clark County Commission Chairman Tick Segerblom said at the hearing in May that there was “a major problem as far as getting approval from the airport,” but some “higher-ups went to the White House and made it all happen.”

Standing before the commission, Doumani held an oversized rendering of the resort and said the project is based on the late famed architect Paul Revere Williams’ original renderings of La Concha, which opened in 1961.

The motel’s shell-shaped lobby was moved in 2006 to its current home at The Neon Museum, which uses the mid-century modern building as its visitors’ center.

Las Vegas has great 4,000-room megaresorts, Doumani told the commission, “but I think we need a little bit of the 1960s Rat Pack kind of vibe.”

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.