Skylofts at MGM Grand: A pictorial

By M. Scott Smith

I've made reference to the touch-screen remote controls; they're all over the loft. Here are some close-ups.

Crestron full-blown remotes. Two handheld, wireless, full-size touch-screen color remotes are available in the lofts. One is stationed in the living room, and one in the bedroom. You can pick these up and control virtually every function of the loft -- from lighting to television to music to temperature to the drapes.

Adjusting the temp. This is how you set the temperature and control the fans. It was very hot while I was in Vegas -- the temperature exceeded 110 degrees during the day. Skylofts is on the top floor of the MGM Grand (the 29th and 30th floors, to be exact). Heat rises. The loft has enormous two-story windows, and dozens upon dozens of recessed lights scattered about. What does this mean? There's a lot of heat being generated. During the late day, even with the temperature set to 65 degrees, my loft's air conditioner had trouble bringing the temperature down to 70. It was never unpleasant, but if you want a frigid cold loft, you might not want to visit during July.

Adjusting the lights. The lights nicely fade from one program to the next. There are a lot of lights -- direct lights, indirect lights, etc.

Music. All of the Bang and Olufsen music systems are wired into an Escient Fireball music server. This allows you to pull up songs from a generous library directly from the remote. There are also many satellite radio channels available in different genres. You can also play your own CDs, of course.

A fixed remote. In the master bathroom, there is a touch-panel color remote fixed to the wall. It allows you to bring up all the functions you can on the full-size wireless remotes. You can control the televisions from these remotes, for example quickly jumping to preset stations. There were also several smaller, screenless fixed remotes scattered throughout the loft, for example near the entryway. This had fixed buttons to quickly set lighting programs, e.g. "all off" for when you're leaving the loft.