High Expectations

Steven Davidovici has to raise his voice to be heard over the steady grind of power saws and drills, whose loud growls reverberate through the halls like clanging industrial thunderclaps.

He's standing in the shadowy depths of a mega-club-in-the-making, the hotly anticipated LAX, whose deeply hued decor is materializing right before his very eyes on a recent Tuesday afternoon.

It's a week and a half before the premiere of the new nightspot, and there's still plenty of work to be done: walls to be painted, carpet to be laid, antique mirrors to be hung, perilously lofty expectations to be fulfilled.

And Davidovici, a managing partner in nightclub/dining trendsetters Pure Management Group, is standing in the eye of this lavish storm.

"I'm nervous, excited, stressful," he says with a grin and a discernible East Coast accent.

A labyrinthine, 26,000-square-foot property, LAX has a lot to live up to.

Its sister location in Hollywood has become a see-and-be-seen celebrity playground with all the star-gazing of a ritzy planetarium.

To wit, when the Vegas LAX opens tonight, pop tabloid princess Britney Spears will be the guest of honor, and may even perform a couple of songs, "If she feels like it, " Davidovici says.

Ensconced in the Luxor where the Ra nightclub used to be, LAX is a centerpiece in MGM-Mirage's $350 million makeover of the casino.

A sweeping, bilevel venue, LAX has the feel of an ornate gothic opera house.

Its entrance is announced in grand fashion with a towering, two-story iron gate, suggestive of a cathedral of ostentation.

Inside, the club is both intimate and expansive at once, with low ceilings in places on the first floor and a second tier that feels close to the dance floor beneath it.

Richly appointed with burgundy drapery, black marble floors, tufted red leather walls and dozens of chandeliers and candles, the main room is dominated by a towering DJ stand, which will be manned on many nights by big-name residents DJ Vice and DJ AM, that buttresses a scarlet red backdrop.

The second floor is partitioned off into seven skyboxes, which seat from 10 to 25, and a series of adjacent alcoves.

"There's a lot of areas to roam around in, instead of just going to one room," Davidovici says as he tours the property. "It's really intricate and different looking. We took a little bit of an old-school feel and modernized it. We tried to make a big space have a boutique feel."

In addition to LAX, an upscale restaurant, Company American Bistro, and a tucked away, reservations-only bar, Noir Bar, also will open on the property.

"Money can't get you in," Davidovici says of Noir. "What happens in Vegas really doesn't stay in Vegas, we just put it out there. But at this place, it will. We're really going to keep it very, very exclusive, very private."

It's all a long time coming for Davidovici, who has spent the past two years ushering LAX to completion. He estimates that it will take another two years before the venture covers all its expenses.

"It's four years before you really make a dollar," he says. "It's a timely process."

And it's a challenging one in a city like Vegas, where the nightclub circuit is already larger than life and new entries are under a lot of pressure to distinguish themselves from the crowded ranks of chic ultra clubs.

"I think what's happened is that nightclubs have become such a dominant part of the Las Vegas scene that you have to keep reinventing yourself," says Robert Frey, a managing partner in Pure. "Our challenge here was to create something that would be exciting to not only everyone staying in this area, but enough of a reason to leave another hotel to come here."

Location should be an asset to LAX, in that there's not a lot of direct competition in the immediate vicinity.

Davidovici knows as much, and he's eager to fill this void with starlets, champagne and ambition bubblier than both.

"There's 11,000 rooms between Mandalay Bay, The Hotel, Four Seasons and the Luxor, but there's really no nightclub at the south end of the Strip," he notes with confidence. "This is going to be that destination point."