The Downtown Entertainment District is continuing to show signs of vitality with another entrepreneur is throwing his coaster into the ring.
Before making the decision to create the Downtown Cocktail Room, Michael Cornthwaite was manager at the Stratosphere's Top of the World gourmet restaurant, assistant general manager at the short-lived Neyla Mediterranean restaurant at the MGM Grand, and then general manager at Paris' Risqué nightclub. Along with his experience, he's going into the business with a silent partner under the rubric, Creative Nightlife Concepts.
Cornthwaite is hoping his lounge at 111 Las Vegas Blvd. S., will become an anchor for locals, a space that will reflect his own tastes in music, fine art and relaxed atmosphere.
"I want to surround myself with people that I really want to be around, rather than trying to make as many dollars as possible, Cornthwaite says. "That's why you won't hear commercial hip-hip music, you won't hear top-40, you won't hear all the things that are really popular right now. I'm going for the 25-and-up demographic."
The 3,040-square-foot room has been designed by Jawa Studio of Las Vegas and the award-winning Charles Gruwell. Seating will include the standard bar chairs and couches, but also love seats, creating a more intimate feel. The color scheme will be warm reds and oranges, with burnished steel accents. Large mirrors will make use of not just interior lighting, but also sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Windows? Sunlight? Yep, because Cornthwaite is planning to keep the rather civilized hours of 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.
But Cornthwaite is perhaps most proud of the painting behind the long bar, inspired by his own favorite, Pablo Picasso's "Trois Femmes," which he had seen at Vegas' Guggenheim-Hermitage.
"I originally had an idea for a bar called Trois Femmes but I felt it just wasn't familiar enough to the average person, and I didn't want people mispronouncing the name constantly and trying to explain where it came from. So I thought I could work that in, in keeping with an artistically creative environment, comfortable, and like it says on the website (
www.downtownlv.net), bohemian chic."
Cornthwaite is hoping for a late October-early November opening.