Want to live on desperado street? Check in at Euro Disney's Hotel Cheyenne. This 1,000-room, moderately priced facility was conceived by Robert A.M. Stern and his team not as a literal l9th-century wild West town, but as a movie backlot version of one, where guests are actors in their own vacation. According to Stern, "The hotel capitalizes on what we have all grown up to expect from the West through movies. It has little to do with the real thing." Europeans love Hollywood Westerns, so it is expected that they will love this hotel. The Michelin Guide to Euro Disney tells the vacationing family that turning a corner, they may even run into some trigger-happy characters. The young people from many nations who work in the hotel are decked out in cowboy clothes with a distinct Ralph Lauren flair, and they have been taught to say, "Howdy." Stern once went so far as to suggest that klieg lights be trained on the scene, but decided that hyper real sets, as in a movie, would suffice. The "town square" includes a cafe, saloon, fort, and general store. Storefronts, barns, a schoolhouse, and a water tank are concocted with the same care and affection that Hollywood set designers bring to their work. Streets are arranged to create vistas with curious and lovely little Western buildings at the ends of each one. All the familiar props are on hand, composed in a painterly fashion – corral gates, tipis, covered wagons, white picket fences with a few flourishes: antlers, bags of oats, harnesses, and saddles. And the surface of the streets? Not the mud of the true West, nor the asphalt one expects everywhere, but a layer of dirt and small pebbles bound together in concrete. It is the same stabilized dirt found in the Tuileries – Stern's homage to Paris.
Credits [see page 117] Design Architect: Robert A.M. Stern Architects, New York City – Robert A.M. Stern (principal-in-charge); Alexander P. Lamis (architect-in-charge); Paul Whalen (architect-in-charge of conceptual design); Daniel Lobitz (senior assistant); Christopher Blake, Keller A. Easterling, Maria Resende (assistants) Architect of Record: Viguier et Jodry et Assoces Landscape Architects: EDAV; Sasaki Associates Interior Designers: Tricia Wilson and Associates (design); InterArt Etudes (production) Engineer: Gerba 7 Consultants: Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz (lighting); Lighting Design Partnership (interior lighting); Douglas Harding Group (graphics) Construction Manager: COTEBA
