Dive Brief:

• Restoration Hardware announced the opening of RH Las Vegas, The Gallery at Tivoli Village, a 60,000-square-foot, four-level interactive retail experience and next-generation design gallery space.

• RH Las Vegas features artistic installations of home furnishings in a gallery setting, including an entire floor dedicated to the RH Modern line with an integrated RH Contemporary Art Gallery. The new store also houses Design Atelier, a professional workspace that allows customers, designers and architects to conceptualize and customize a home.

• Restoration Hardware developed RH Las Vegas in collaboration with design architect James Gillam of Backen, Gillam & Kroeger, recognized as one of Architectural Digest’s Top 100 architect and design firms in the world.

Dive Insight:

If you are going to open in Las Vegas, go big and go bright. Take a bit of a gamble, and it might pay off. Of course, amid everything else that's so big and bright in Vegas, it may still be hard to get noticed, and that gamble can easily become a slippery slope.

Restoration Hardware seems comfortable making this bet, however. It's a retailer that still believes in investing to impress with its brick-and-mortar strategy, regardless of whether it's opening a new store in Las Vegas or somewhere else. At the moment, it's doing fine with that approach, having reported growing revenue — although lower same-store sales — as part of its third quarter earnings report in September. At the same time, the chain is not doing much with social media, and there are questions about the viability of its RH Grey Card loyalty program.

Still, the moneyed customers RH is trying to woo with the glitz and glamor of RH Las Vegas may end up feeling right at home inside its French doors. “Our vision with RH Las Vegas is to re-imagine the retail experience by blurring the lines between residential and retail, indoors and outdoors, physical and digital — creating an environment that is more home than store,” RH Chairman and CEO Gary Friedman stated in a press release.

In that respect RH joins the ranks of retailers like Apple that are trying to create stores that are supposed to feel like anything but stores. It's an interesting idea, but could become fatuous if not properly executed. AT RH Las Vegas, they may come for the rooftop views and the gallery — or will they? — but it also would be nice if they spent a a night's worth of blackjack winnings on some furniture to help RH recoup what it spent on this grandiose edifice.