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Bigger Mac: The fast food giant makes a Vegas-sized brand statement with its new Western U.S. flagship.
By Matthew Hall
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and that includes the design dimensions of McDonald's Corp.'s latest restaurant on the fabled Strip. At 8,600 square feet, the fast-food giant's new eatery on Las Vegas Boulevard is twice the size of the chain's typical units.
The new McDonald's takes the place of a nearby, 25-year-old unit that the company's senior director of U.S. restaurant design candidly characterizes as being "beaten and worn out." "We wanted to replace that restaurant with one that would become a destination in and of itself, as befits something located on the Strip," says Max Carmona. "We also wanted it to serve as a Western U.S. flagship that would communicate to Vegas' millions of domestic and international visitors what McDonald's is all about these days."
To help McDonald's in-house team fulfill that vision, the company worked with trio of design firms: New York-based Lippincott; Casablanca Design Group of Marietta, Ga.; and Park Ridge, Ill.-based Chipman Adams Architecture. The result of that collaboration is a high-profile eatery unlike any of McDonald's 31,000-plus company-owned or franchised locales around the world-including its half-dozen sister units on the Strip. (The new flagship is the only freestanding McDonald's on Las Vegas Boulevard; all the others are ensconced in casinos, food courts and shopping complexes.)
The restaurant was built on land that formerly housed the Westward Ho Hotel & Casino, which was closed in 2005 and subsequently razed. To take full advantage of that site's street-level locale, the front of the new McDonald's features a two-story, LED-lit marquee on one corner that's topped by the Golden Arches, as well as four 8-by-8-foot video screens that sit side-by-side across the top of the facade and play sequential or simultaneous promotional videos.
Inside, patrons encounter a main dining room whose ceiling height is 25 feet. That taller ceiling serves a dual purpose, says Michael Ceferin, McDonald's divisional senior lead architect, U.S. restaurant design. "The ceiling height translates into a building shell that's two stories tall, which gives it a profile that's much more in scale with the surrounding casinos than our typical single-story design would be," Ceferin explains. "In addition, the higher ceiling offers diners a light and airy environment that's very inviting."
Designers sought to take advantage of that taller ceiling in several specific ways. For instance, they installed a glass wall on one side of the dining hall that lets in lots of light. And to add a calming visual element for diners, four large murals bearing abstract desert scenes were placed on the interior wall above the entrance doors. Finally, to provide some high-tech buzz to the space, a 14-screen "media ring" is suspended from the ceiling over a communal dining table.
The high ceiling is just one of several outsized features designers incorporated into the restaurant to help it accommodate the crush of crowds coming in from the Strip. Other pumped-up elements include: six entrances (four sliding doors across the front and two standard doors on its sides) as opposed to the usual two; five counter registers, rather than three; seating for 186, as compared with the typical 75; and two kitchen units instead of one.
On the other side of the coin, there's one aspect of the restaurant's operations that's smaller than its conventional counterparts: its drive-through. While those window operations typically account for roughly 60 percent of the business at most McDonald's, the percentage at the new Vegas unit is "much lower than that," Carmona says. "At this particular locale, the pedestrian is king, and our design caters mainly to that customer."
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