Casino Hotels

The Montreal property is unusual before you get anywhere near its facilities, because the main structure began life as the French pavilion for the 1967 world exposition and still stands on an island in the St Lawrence. The circular, terraced form was designed to be looked at from across the water, and it has never entirely stopped being an exhibition building.

As a hotel it is a full-service one — restaurants across several price points, event and function space, and an island setting with river views that has more in common with a park than with a strip. The gaming floor is one department among these, occupying several levels of the pavilion, and guests can use the hotel for the setting alone.

Fallsview Casino Resort is set into the escarpment above the Niagara gorge, and its position is the point: a large part of the building's public frontage is given to the view of the falls, which the architecture treats as the principal amenity.

The resort operates as a sizeable hotel with a theatre, a spa, conference facilities and a range of dining rooms, several of which face the water. The gaming floor sits within that larger complex. Visitors arriving for a show or a weekend by the falls use the property without necessarily using it.

River Rock Casino Resort stands on the Fraser River in Richmond, with a marina at its edge and the Vancouver airport a short distance away — a combination that makes it as much an arrivals hotel as a destination one.

The property includes a hotel tower, a show theatre that draws touring acts, a spa, and a spread of restaurants serving the surrounding community as well as guests. A gaming floor is part of the complex. The riverside frontage and the transit link into Vancouver do a good deal of the work in explaining who stays here.

Casino Rama Resort sits in cottage country near Orillia, on land belonging to the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, and it was developed as a First Nations enterprise — a fact that shapes the property's design, its employment and its public presentation.

It functions as a resort hotel with a large entertainment venue, several restaurants, meeting space and a setting among lakes and woodland that is a long way from any city. The gaming floor is one facility within that. Indigenous art and design run through the public areas and are not treated as decoration alone.