Just outside San Diego, up in the hills, is the Viejas Casino. A Native American development belonging to the Kumeyaay tribe, the casino recently enjoyed a $20m expansion which aimed at bringing greater value to the

customer, not wringing their wallets out at the door. Marianne Berg, Senior Interior Designer with architects Carrier Johnson, and Bob Scannell, Director of Project Development for Viejas, spoke to Jon Bruford about the project.

Casino International: What's the expansion in basic terms, Bob?

Bob Scannell: In basic terms it is a 48,000 sq ft casino expansion.

CI: How did Carrier Johnson become involved?

BS: We're just a few hours away from Las Vegas so you would imagine there are an awful lot of architects and interior designers who have quite a bit of experience doing casino work based in Las Vegas. But there is a real growing market in Southern California, in particular with Native American gaming growing incredibly fast. Fortunately, there are a number of architects based in Southern California – including Carrier Johnson, whose work I had seen in the past – who have an extensive hospitality background, be it hotels, restaurants, bars, and clubs. Although they had not done casino work at the time, you could see with the way they approached hospitality work that they would be ideal to begin to cultivate some more local experience in casino work. The expansion project didn’t go out to tender, and it wasn’t an open bid process; rather, it was actually me going around and looking for folks who would be well qualified to undertake this process.

Marianne Berg: Even as the interior designer on the job, I was lucky to be involved from the very first day.

BS: Gordon Carrier and Michael Johnson, both partners at Carrier Johnson, selected a core team from within the firm: a couple of interior designers and an architect; they obviously involved their associate engineers as well. The entire team really started together on this project from day one, as opposed to a sequential process of beginning with an engineer, then adding an architect and eventually involving the interior designer. This unanimous team involvement early on resulted as one of the project's greatest strengths.

CI: What was it like before the work started?

BS: The Viejas Casino is owned by the Viejas band of Kumeyaay Indians. Prior to this expansion we operated a 2,000 slot casino, roughly 250,000 sq ft total, with approximately 80 table games, including blackjack, poker, off-track wagering, five restaurants, and more. In addition we have an outlet retail centre that houses about 60 different stores such as Nike and Reebok. We also have a showroom and a 1,500 seat outdoor concert venue where we have concerts in the park. We don’t have a hotel yet; this is part of the plan under consideration by the owner right now, among many other things.

We’ve added about 48,000 sq ft on two levels. Half of that space is dedicated to the guest experience, while the other half is allocated for our team member support areas to encourage the delivery of great service. In this new development, we added room for about 500 slot machines and another 14 table games; again, blackjack primarily, and we have a central bar and lounge area, which is really the visible anchor to the centre of this expansion – we call it the V Lounge. And we also added a small, high-limit area that offers an upgrade in the level of service that we can give to some of our most select guests.

CI: So the owners made the decision to expand based on continuing value rather than easy revenue – to keep players coming back, to keep offering more, rather than expanding and packing that space with more slots or whatever.

BS: While some are focused more on revenue building, we looked more at the value added in what we provide to our guests in this aggressive and competitive local market.

We were trying to make sure that there was a significant upgrade to what we were providing in this new expansion from what our guests may have experienced in the original facility. The desire was to continue to exceed that expectation of our guests, while targeting high quality design.

This is literally a test bed on a number of different levels. It is a test bed not only to see how our guests respond to what we offer here, it’s a test for our team members to continue to raise the bar in efficient service. Ultimately, it is a test bed for our future much larger development.

CI: What was the grand vision?

MB: We wanted a well-designed, high-energy space that would make guests feel good while experiencing the action. For example, we wanted an iconic bar that would energize the space when opened or closed. When we initially started looking at the site, we explored the ubiquitous beauty of the surrounding valley's mountains, trees and desert - gorgeous, organic beauty. And, inspired by the valley's energy and utility, we chose water as one of the key design elements. Although there is no physical water in this space, we just translated it conceptually to communicate its energy. It just kind of fell into place as we got more and more comfortable with the concept that we had set in the beginning.

BS: We're part of a very competitive and growing Southern California gaming market. One of the things that had happened here is that an awful lot of resorts were beginning to have a very similar feel to them, either intentionally or unintentionally; I don’t know why but that’s the way it was. What we decided to do was take advantage of the reservation's very picturesque, natural valley setting. We wanted to find a way to leverage the site's natural beauty and make sure that the guests' experiences were rooted definitely at Viejas; in other words, there was no mistaking that they had come to our place. It wasn’t one of those things where they went home at night and said “Gee dear, which place did we go last night?” It was unmistakable that their experience was at Viejas. We did that by really making sure that we integrated inside and outside, something that doesn’t happen very often in casinos. We actually have about 150 linear feet of window looking straight out from our gaming floor on to our beautiful valley. In the old days you’d get casino folks who would say “Oh, no. All your casinos have to be dark and smoky with no clocks.” We really wanted people to understand where they were and that this beautiful window expanse - the idea driven by Marianne and the people at Carrier Johnson - allowed us to make that connection but in a very soft and abstract way. This 150 linear feet of window is a pattern of coloured glass, that slightly abstracts your view and helps soften natural light, which can be very harsh in a casino environment. The single most important idea was the connection to the outside.

CI: How did you market this to your local customer base?

BS: We marketed it as a way that wasn’t designed with the sole focus of attracting new guests, although there is always an opportunity to do so. It really was to help respond to the feedback that we’d already gotten from our guests who wanted to have another place for a nice bar and lounge atmosphere or some place where it might have been a bit brighter. The programme was really devised from the feedback that we’d already gotten. So now, the feedback is about how successful we were in listening to what you, the customer, had said and the answer, so far, has been resoundingly: ‘You listened very well, thank you. Now what’s next?’

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