XS Is Back — and the New Room Is the Headliner

XS never really closed — it just went dark long enough to become a different room. The Encore nightclub opened on New Year's Eve 2008 and ran seventeen years without a top-to-bottom rebuild. On August 1, Wynn shut it down. On Thursday night, November 5, the doors opened again, and what is behind them is not a refresh. Wynn calls it a complete reimagining, and for once the word fits.

The room is the show now

Start overhead. Wynn's own description of the new room leads with 1,200 moving light pendants — a field of hanging lights that shifts over the dance floor all night. The ceiling carries gold-mirrored LED screens, and the sound and lighting systems are custom, built for this room. The gold is still the gold — the champagne tone Roger Thomas gave the original room survives — but it has been rebuilt as a machine for light. The old room watched the DJ. The new one performs around him.

What a seat costs

The room is only half the story. The other half is what it costs to sit in it. Casinos.com reported the reopening-weekend table market before the doors opened, and the top of it is not a typo: for Rüfüs Du Sol's opening night, the stage table closest to the DJ booth carried a $150,000 minimum spend — about $211,707 out the door once the venue fee, gratuity and taxes land. Calvin Harris's Saturday stage table starts at $60,000, roughly $84,000 all-in. The floor of the market is a $1,500 pool-deck minimum with a limited view of the booth. And according to the same reporting, the famous chandelier is gone — the pendant field is its replacement.

Those numbers are the point of the room. A $150,000 minimum is not a drink order; it is a land claim — the closest seat to the booth, bought for a night, in a room that sells proximity as the product.

Four nights to christen it

Wynn booked the reopening like a festival that happens to have one stage. Rüfüs Du Sol played the first night back on Thursday, November 5 — a DJ set, the Australian act's first XS appearance since New Year's Eve. The Chainsmokers take Friday, November 6. Calvin Harris headlines Saturday, November 7 — Harris has played Wynn rooms since his first Las Vegas residency in 2011, and his current two-year deal keeps him at XS and Encore Beach Club on busy Saturdays through 2027. Diplo goes back-to-back with Hugel to close the weekend on Sunday, November 8.

While the room was dark, none of those names sat idle: Wynn moved its nightlife programming across the resort to Encore Beach Club at Night, and the roster played the pool deck until the main room was ready. Now the center of gravity moves back indoors — two weeks before Formula 1 brings the richest weekend of the year to the Strip, with XS rebuilt and waiting for it.

Seventeen years ago XS was the room that taught Las Vegas what a modern nightclub could charge. The rebuild is a bet that it still is.