Casino Hotels

The Montreal property is inseparable from its site. It stands on Île Notre-Dame, on the artificial island built for Expo 67, and the main building was the French pavilion for that world's fair — an aluminium-clad structure of stacked, canted planes that still looks like a proposition about the future rather than a hotel address.

The interior was reworked to serve hospitality and gaming, and the gaming floor spreads across several levels linked by the pavilion's original vertical circulation, which gives it a spatial character that purpose-built rooms of this kind rarely manage. Restaurants, a cabaret-style show room and event spaces occupy the rest.

Guests generally come for the island as much as the building: the Formula 1 circuit, the rowing basin and the parkland are all on the doorstep, and the city centre is a short ride across the water. Gaming is one facility here among several, and the architecture keeps the upper hand.

Fallsview is a full resort hotel set into the escarpment above the Horseshoe Falls, and it is organised almost entirely around that view. The building steps down the slope so that the upper floors, restaurants and terraces look out over the gorge; rooms are priced and described by what they face, and the ones that face the water are the reason most people book.

Beyond the guest floors there is a large theatre that draws touring acts, a spa, a spread of restaurants from casual to formal, and a connection through to the shops and attractions along Fallsview Boulevard, so the resort works as a self-contained winter destination when the weather outside is unwelcoming.

The gaming floor is substantial and sits at the heart of the plan, but it is one department of a hotel that also has to handle conferences, wedding parties and families who never go near it.

River Rock stands on the Fraser River in Richmond, just outside Vancouver, with its own marina and a rail link that puts the airport minutes away and downtown Vancouver a short ride in the other direction. That position — between the airport and the city — shapes the hotel more than anything else. It absorbs a great deal of short-stay and transit business, and its service is built for guests arriving late and leaving early.

The resort includes a hotel tower, a theatre used for concerts and boxing, a spa, and a range of restaurants including several that lean on the region's Chinese and Pacific Northwest cooking.

The gaming floor is one of the largest in the province and is the reason for the resort's existence, but the building has diversified around it to the point where the waterside setting and the entertainment programme carry equal weight.

Casino Rama sits on Chippewas of Rama First Nation land near Orillia, north of Toronto, and its relationship with that community is not incidental — it is owned by the First Nation and the design references Indigenous art and motif throughout the public spaces rather than reaching for the generic resort vocabulary.

The hotel is a low-rise, spread-out complex rather than a tower, with an entertainment centre that has hosted touring performers for decades, several restaurants, and conference facilities that keep the property busy outside the summer season.

Its setting in the lakes and cottage country of central Ontario gives it a different rhythm from an urban property: guests arrive by car for a weekend, and the gaming floor is one part of a stay that usually also involves a show, a long dinner and the drive back down through the lakes.