BELOVED AMERICAN DESIGNER, ROGER THOMAS, JOINS FOG & APPLE

| New York, NY | Roger Thomas, the designer of the celebrated Wynn Hotels and Resorts properties around the world, leaves his mark on design by grounding it in both a solid foundation of historical context and real practical experience in the craft and production of furnishings. A graduate of northwest Michigan’s noted Interlochen Academy and Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, his training is always evident in his work: he was studio-trained in painting, sculpture, textiles, metalsmithing, and ceramics, with a major in art history. Creating environments was the perfect combination of all these passions, and a natural step in his career. 

Thomas grew up in Las Vegas as the son of a local banker who played a key role in financing Wynn’s first hotel investments in Las Vegas. Wynn enlisted Roger’s help as he began to develop entirely new properties at his own practice, focused on office interiors. They collaborated on early projects like the Mirage hotel-casino, and forever changed the industry mold in a major way with Bellagio. Clocks, flowers, skylights, wide-open spaces, a massive art collection: the hotel was a $1.6 billion bet on human psychology that paid off massively. Doing the opposite of the usual has become Thomas’ trademark, and he has since reinvented the look of modern gambling by deliberately violating every previously accepted rule of casino design.

The company’s most recent hotels are a genre almost entirely their own, a blend of opulent creativity and seductive comfort. Thomas works determinedly to bring ideas from sketch to operational reliability, partnering with manufacturers and clients to create brand new mechanisms such as the giant parasols that grace one hotel lobby’s lofty reaches. He and his team also travel the world to gather authentic artifacts that connect patrons to the lives of the leisure classes in grand settings of centuries past.

Thomas spends holidays touring world capitals, sketching his way through museums, restaurants, hotels and great houses. As he looks ahead, his respect for history and the great designs of the past continues to inform his work.