The $150,000-a-Night Room at the Top of a $5.7 Billion Bet Nobody Can Legally Play

Two duplex apartments at the peak of a 352-meter tower in Ras Al Khaimah are the last word from two of hospitality design's biggest names, in a country where gambling is still a crime for everyone who isn't standing on one specific casino floor.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-09-02

At the summit of Wynn Al Marjan Island's tower, 70 stories above the Arabian Gulf, two duplex apartments are taking shape that will not resemble anything else built in the region. Wynn Resorts calls them the Royal Apartments: 1,500 square meters each, roughly 16,000 square feet, spread across two levels, commissioned as the penultimate projects of two designers who rarely take on hotel work anymore, London's Anouska Hempel and Paris's Pinto Design. They sit above a resort that has grown, delayed, and absorbed war-driven cost overruns on its way to a September 2027 opening, in a federal legal system that still classifies gambling as a crime everywhere in the country except the licensed floor beneath these two apartments.

A Tower Built to Hold Two Rooms at the Top

Wynn Al Marjan Island's tower topped out in December 2025 at 352 meters across 70 floors, a height Wynn's own leadership describes as making it the tallest structure in the Northern Emirates by more than 100 meters. The top floors house Enclave, a 313-suite hotel-within-a-hotel that Wynn built as its own arrival experience: a private, guarded entry drive, a lobby available only to Enclave guests, and elevators that serve no more than 15 rooms per floor. Six floorplans run from 800-square-foot Enclave King Suites up to the two Royal Apartments at the very top, each with its own construction of scale that has no real precedent in the UAE outside Dubai's handful of signature suites.

Wynn has not published confirmed rates for the Royal Apartments. Independent luxury-property analysts covering the project have estimated nightly pricing in the range of AED 75,000 to AED 150,000 or more, somewhere between $20,000 and $41,000 a night, a range that would put the suites in the same conversation as the Royal Penthouse Suite at Geneva's Hotel President Wilson and Dubai's own Atlantis The Royal Mansion. Wynn's Enclave suites more broadly are expected to open at a fraction of that, with entry-level King Suites estimated around AED 4,000 a night.

The Designers' Last Commissions

Anouska Hempel built her reputation on London's Blakes and The Franklin, credited by many in the industry with inventing the modern boutique hotel concept decades before the term existed. Pinto Design, the Paris-based interiors house founded by Linda Pinto, has spent years working at the top of European residential and hospitality design. Wynn's own release describes the Royal Apartments as the penultimate commissions of both firms in collaboration with in-house Wynn Design & Development, meaning this is close to the last hotel interior either studio plans to take on. Todd-Avery Lenahan, president and chief creative officer of Wynn Design & Development, has framed the apartments as jewel-cutting work, describing a design philosophy built around what he calls veiling and revealing, where restraint does more work than obvious display.

Below the Royal Apartments, Enclave also includes four garden Townhomes, ranging from 630 to 1,110 square meters, reached through a private Royal Foyer inspired by the grand private residences of Paris. Guests get a dedicated 24-hour butler and culinary staff and private chauffeured transportation, along with private spa facilities, salons, libraries and outdoor courtyards built into the two-level layouts. Ten additional Marina and Ocean Estates ring the property's marina and beachfront, rounding out an Enclave portfolio that Wynn now counts at 323 total accommodations once suites, apartments, townhomes and estates are combined.

Ninety-Eight Berths for Boats Most People Will Never See

The resort's marina is engineered to a scale that matches the accommodations above it: a 98-berth deep-water basin designed to dock superyachts up to 85 meters long, built around a central island feature with berths radiating outward to make use of water space that a simple grid layout would have wasted. IGY Marinas, engaged since 2022 to advise on the marina's design, will manage it once open, working alongside Marina Solutions International on the underlying engineering. The marina sits at the center of a 150-acre site that Wynn describes as its first beachfront property anywhere in the world, fronted by roughly 420 meters, about 4,500 feet, of private beach split across three distinct beach environments for the resort, adult, and Enclave guest tiers.

The rest of the numbers scale the same way. The property will carry 1,217 resort rooms in the main tower plus the 297 additional Enclave suites, 24 restaurants and lounges including a two-floor, roughly 1,820-square-meter French-American steakhouse from Alain Ducasse and a Middle East outpost of the Los Angeles supper club Delilah, a 2,633-square-meter column-free ballroom inside a 145,000-square-foot events complex, and 12 pools spread across the grounds.

Where the $600 Million Went

Wynn Al Marjan Island's budget has moved three times since construction began in 2023, when the project was quoted at roughly $3.9 billion. By mid-2025 that figure had climbed to $5.1 billion. On its second-quarter 2026 earnings call, CEO Craig Billings told investors the company was adding another $600 million, pushing the total to approximately $5.7 billion, a 46 percent increase over the original construction-start budget, and pushing the opening back roughly six months from an originally planned spring 2027 date to September 2027.

Billings attributed roughly half of that latest increase, about $300 million, directly to the U.S.-Iran war. Marine war-risk insurance premiums in the Persian Gulf spiked from around 0.15 percent of hull value before the conflict to between 7.5 and 10 percent at their peak, supply routes had to be rerouted or expedited around a disrupted Strait of Hormuz, and the extended construction timeline generated additional capitalized interest. Wynn holds a 40 percent stake in the joint venture developing the resort and has said the higher budget will require roughly $240 million in additional equity from the company, on top of the more than $1.06 billion it had already contributed by the second quarter of 2026. Despite the war-related disruption, Billings told analysts the company never considered pausing the project, framing continued construction as cheaper than the alternative and calling the UAE a country that absorbs pressure and keeps functioning rather than one that gets knocked off course by it.

The Law That Still Says No

Gambling has been a federal criminal offense in the UAE for decades, currently governed under Federal Decree-Law No. 31 of 2021 on Crimes and Penalties, which treats unlicensed gambling as a crime carrying fines and potential imprisonment regardless of nationality or visitor status. That did not change when the UAE created the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority in 2023, and it has not changed since. What changed is narrower: in October 2024, the GCGRA issued its first and, so far, only commercial gaming operator license, to Wynn Resorts, for a single licensed gaming floor inside this one resort. Everywhere else in the country, including elsewhere in Ras Al Khaimah and across Dubai, the underlying prohibition remains fully in force.

That leaves Wynn Al Marjan Island as a monopoly by design rather than accident, at least for now. Analysts at Morgan Stanley have projected the UAE's eventual gaming market could reach $3 billion to $5 billion in annual gross gaming revenue once mature, a figure that would place the country somewhere between Singapore's roughly $5.25 billion market and a fraction of Macau's approximately $22.7 billion. MGM Resorts has a casino license application pending for a project in Abu Dhabi, which would end Wynn's exclusivity if approved, but for now Wynn is the only operator with a license anywhere in the country.

A Bet Built Around a Single Emirate

Ras Al Khaimah has spent nearly two decades diversifying an economy that officials say now keeps no single sector above 27 percent of GDP, built on ceramics and pharmaceutical manufacturing, logistics, and a tourism sector authorities expect Wynn to help push toward 3.8 million annual visitors by 2027 and as high as 5.5 million after that. The emirate's leadership under Sheikh Saud bin Saqr Al Qasimi has treated the resort as the visible edge of a broader pitch, one meant to draw residential and industrial investment well beyond anyone who ever sets foot on the casino floor.

For Wynn Resorts, the calculation runs the other way. A company with a 72.3 percent stake in Wynn Macau Limited and full ownership of its Las Vegas and Boston Harbor properties has effectively bet a project now approaching $5.7 billion, absorbed through a regional war, a construction delay, and a market that will likely never approach Macau's scale, on the idea that being first, and for the moment the only operator licensed anywhere in the country, is worth more than the math on any single balance sheet suggests. The two duplex apartments at the top of the tower are the most visible expression of that bet: a room built for a guest who can afford $40,000 a night, inside a country where the government has decided, for now, that almost nobody else gets to play at all.