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A beloved local institution, the Peppermill occupies 1.1 acres at 2985 Las Vegas Boulevard South, south of the Riviera. The Peppermill not only has seen its share of celebrity sightings (Quentin Tarantino, for one), it’s been immortalized on the silver screen. The first shot of Sharon Stone in Martin Scorcese’s Casino depicts her perched alongside the famous fire pit in the Peppermill’s cocktail lounge.
It’s currently owned by Lorenzo Doumani and has an assessed value of $3.3 million. However, even in the newly chastened Las Vegas real estate market, it would likely go for five times that amount.
In his capacity as president of Majestic Resorts, Doumani sold the 5.43-acre La Concha motel site, immediately to the north of the Peppermill, for $180 million –- or just over $33 million an acre. Of course, that was in October of last year, when land valuations along the Strip were still giddy and arguably unrealistic in terms of recouping one’s investment. By stunning contrast, the 1.9-acre parcel immediately south of the Peppermill was priced at roughly $2 million per acre in May 2005, a mere two-and-a-half years earlier.
Owner Doumani describes himself as a developer and designer of Beverly Hills mansions. According to his official biography, "His father, Edward Doumani, built the Tropicana and icons El Morocco and La Concha and was Steve Wynn's longtime partner in the Golden Nugget Las Vegas and Atlantic City." The La Concha was subsequently donated to the Neon Museum, where its reconstructed lobby will serve as the visitor center.
The younger Doumani had planned to use the La Concha land as the springboard for the Conrad Majestic, a high-end Hilton-branded condo-hotel consisting of condominum units and "super suites." The project went through four design iterations. Originally, it was to be two towers. Then it was scaled back to one tower, due to rising construction costs. Litigation involving design involving a nearby (and subsequently canceled) Related Cos. project also impeded the Conrad’s forward progress.
Then, in September 2005, the two-tower plan was back in place … until January, that is, when it was back to a one-tower plan again. (The serio-comic history of this project is chronicled, with copious illustration, at VegasTodayAndTomorrow.com.) This time it was a 59-story 912-unit project, topped off with 10 floors of "Waldorf-Astoria Residences." Yes, we thought that was a typo, too. It wasn’t.
As of October 2006, the project was budgeted at $825 million. "At this point, I'm not worried about saturation," Doumani told the Las Vegas Business Press. "The condo-hotel market runs like the hotel market, as opposed to the housing market. And Las Vegas still has a 91 percent occupancy rate citywide."
"It's perfect timing for this project to get back on track," added realtor Bruce Hiatt.
True to the Conrad’s karma, however, it was pushed to the back burner in August 2007, then officially scrapped in November, when Doumani sold the La Concha land to Triple Five. The latter hopes to build an eight-tower (!) metaresort at the northeast corner of the Strip and Convention Center Road.
Triple Five has not only been a shareholder in the adjacent Riviera hotel-casino, it paid $12 million per acre last spring to gobble up the Somerset Plaza and Somerset Motel. Triple Five’s plan, if consummated, would presumably mean the demise of the Peppermill. But at present, a few stubborn property holders stand between Triple Five and its (seemingly economically unfeasible) dream project.
As for Doumani, he’s something of a renaissance man. He plowed his trust fund into Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club. He’s also credited as writer/producer/director, even lyricist and actor, on a number of films, including the boxing drama Knockout (2000), the following year’s Vegas, City of Dreams (described on IMDB as "Excruciatingly pointless"), and 2006’s Monster Night. Unlike other Doumani productions, Monster Night did not star wife Brenda Epperson (late of the soap opera Passions) but did feature Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the role of "Frostbite."