Darla Real, director of interior design at Resorts World Las Vegas, is planning to attend Hotec Design, an annual conference presented by Questex Hospitality, the parent company of Hotel Management. At the conference, buyers like Real will meet one-on-one with hospitality-focused suppliers to learn about new products and services and to keep up to date on emerging trends.
As a child, Real grew up in a home filled with French provincial furniture. “As I grew older, I absolutely hated it,” she recalled. At about 12 years old, she convinced her parents to let her redesign her bedroom and select her own furniture—and she became fascinated by the art of design. After further studies in high school, she set out for college with plans to be a business major, but soon decided to follow her passion, graduating from California State University at Sacramento with a degree in design.
After graduation, Real worked for a residential designer in Sacramento, learning to appreciate fabrics and patterns and how to put things together. ”That's not something, really, that they teach you in school,” she said. “You either innately know it or you learn it.”
Viva Las Vegas
Ready for a change from California, Real moved to Las Vegas in 1995, just as the Strip was getting major new and design-forward developments. She spent five years with the Steelman Partners team before moving on to Morris & Brown at the turn of the millennium. With years of experience in working in hotel design, she joined the MGM Resorts International team, starting off as a senior interior designer and then becoming the interior design manager in 2007.
Real calls the opportunities she had at MGM “pretty immense.” After starting out as a midlevel designer, she became a liaison with the individual properties in the group’s portfolio. When MGM began developing the City Center project, she shifted her focus to a management position. “I was able to work with different design firms all across the country and world,” she said.
After 10 years with MGM, Real held a range of positions with a number of notable Vegas-based companies, starting with Tandem, DSAA Interiors/Steelman Partners (again), Las Vegas Sands Corp. and finally Cleo Design, which merged with Klai Juba Wald Architects in 2018. She remained with Klai Juba until 2020, when she became director of interior design at Resorts World Las Vegas, finding stability as the pandemic upended the industry.
Resorts World Las Vegas, which opened in June last year, has 3,500 guestrooms and suites from three Hilton brands: a marquee Hilton Hotels & Resorts hotel, the largest Conrad Hotels & Resorts property in the world and one of the first LXR Hotels & Resorts locations in the U.S. The resort has more than 250,000 square feet of meeting and event space, more than 40 restaurants and bars and nine pools around the grounds.
After nearly a year of operations, Real said the resort is still evolving, and she has been evaluating the designs and business practices that went into place during the development phase: “Now we're making corrections to make sure that it's successful.” The team is already reconsidering the designs of some restaurants and public spaces and are determining what to do with areas that have not yet been built out at all.
The desert city has kept her interest for all these years because of its distinctive hospitality industry, she said. “We move really, really fast—like, I would say our projects might go from concept to opening within 10 months sometimes,” she said. Likewise, Las Vegas always has something new in development, she added, so the industry never feels stale.
Lessons Learned
Having worked both in design firms and with hotel companies, Real has found ways to balance creativity with practicality. “In my position now, I'm not as creative as I would be when I was on the design side of things,” she said. “But what I like about being on the owner side is you do get to mentor designers and you do get to help educate them about products.” Designers, she said, will select an element for a project that looks nice but is not appropriate for the application. “I evaluate if it's appropriate for our business and if it's appropriate for the final use and if it's appropriate aesthetically within the overall scheme of the project itself.”
Design, Real said, is an exciting industry. “It's always changing. … You might build something that lasts three to five years and then you're redoing it," she said. "So we're always on the cutting edge of things.”
Real attends both large and small conferences to keep up to date on what’s happening in the industry and what new products are coming online. She appreciates smaller conferences like Hotec Design where she can ask specific questions of suppliers. “I can think about all my individual projects that are going on and see how they can work to help me,” she said. Similarly, since she is no longer working in design firms, these one-on-one meetings offer an education about what is new in the field. Real is also building up her team at Resorts World because the initial project partnered with outside designers. “We're taking some of the stuff internally now, so this will be invaluable to me in that respect.”
The 2022 Hotec Design conference will take place June 20-23 at the Breakers Palm Beach in Florida. Registration is open for both buyers and suppliers.