WAS your bathroom inspired by staying at a boutique hotel, right down to the stack of plump white towels? Or have you adopted the fashionable trend for having a mini-bar in your bedroom? Hip hotels might have influenced domestic decor of late, but for a few lucky (and rich) people the distinction between the luxury of a hotel stay and the nitty-gritty of everyday life is set to blur yet further, as two of the world’s hippest hoteliers, Ian Schrager and André Balazs, branch out into property with four residential projects in the heart of Manhattan.

So imagine waking up in your apartment in a landmark building designed by a leading architect. You’re feeling idle, so why not dial for a room-service breakfast? Or ask the concierge to get your dry-cleaning collected, book a table in your favourite restaurant — and arrange to have someone walk your dogs while you lunch.

Tempting? It should be, for Schrager and Balazs have made their careers and fortunes out of titillating our senses, anticipating our needs and setting trends. Both started out in nightclubs, before moving into the hotel trade and building upmarket condominiums (American for flats to buy). Schrager’s credentials as a taste-maker, firmly established in London with the St Martin’s Lane and Sanderson hotels, stretch back to Studio 54. Balazs is less well known here but in America his portfolio includes the Mercer Hotel in SoHo and the celeb-magnet Château Marmont as well as three other hotels.

For both, property seemed the next logical step, although Balazs, the on-off boyfriend of the actress Uma Thurman, concedes that for him it was born out of necessity. “After 9/11 no one was prepared to finance two new hotels in Manhattan.” So his Kenmare Square location, intended as a new Standard hotel offering “affordable accommodation for prosperous young people” in downtown Manhattan, was reworked for $1.5 million (about £800,000) into an apartment building for the same target customer. And along the street from the Mercer, a site conceived as an “even more super-luxe hotel” was reinvented as a deluxe apartment building.

For the two schemes Balazs used the same architects:Richard Gluckman at Kenmare Square and Jean Nouvel, architect of the new Reina Sofia museum extension in Madrid, at 40 Mercer. “Both buildings changed completely,” he says. “The façade you get from a row of 16ft-wide rooms will change when you’ve got 4,000sq ft spaces. But the spirit is the same.”

Balazs and Schrager, masters at using architecture and design to generate the kind of buzz that fills hotel rooms, are now using the same approach to sell property. For the new condos, which are being built next to his Gramercy Park Hotel, Schrager chose the British architect John Pawson. For his town houses (with flats above) in Bond Street, NoHo, he chose Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame.

Balazs’s choice of Gluckman for Kenmare Square was in part a sentimental nod to a now vanished SoHo, Gluckman having designed many of the galleries that helped to turn this hitherto rundown area of Lower Manhattan into the swanky quarter it is today. “The art has all moved out now, but here we had an opportunity to put up a building which is a work of art,” he says. What’s more the choice of Nouvel, a “marquee architect with a world-class reputation”, certainly helped politically when it came to building on the last major empty plot in SoHo.

“The challenge was that this is a historic district, with more controls about what you could build, and it has an incredibly sophisticated community. Jean Nouvel was the perfect choice, not just because he is a master of Modernism, but because . . . he works with a gritty toughness that somehow recalls SoHo’s mercantile past.”

The resulting design was a landmark building that won the approval of the powers-that-be in what Herbert Muschamp, writing in The New York Times, hailed as “a decision of breathtaking importance for the future of architecture in New York. Think Edward Hopper crossed with Pedro Almodóvar.” Today New Yorkers strolling down Broadway can enjoy the sight of Nouvel’s building for free, just as they can the Woolworth building to the south or the Chrysler to the north. But living in the building doesn’t come cheap. In fact it will cost you what Balazs himself disarmingly calls “crazy prices — around $3,800 a square foot”. Likewise Schrager’s Gramercy, where at between $4 million and $16 million buyers are paying roughly double the going rate, attracted by the hotel services and an address stacked with kudos in this most status-aware of cities, plus spectacular views of Manhattan’s only private square, enjoyed through its vast windows.

Karl Lagerfeld has just bought one, while a London couple has purchased a Herzog & Meuron town house (now just a hole in the ground) at Bond Street. Indeed, there’s no shortage of willing customers. “Everything I could think of after 22 years of living in SoHo I put into this project,” Balazs insists. And if all this insight comes at a price? As one estate agent told me, it’s one some are willing and able to pay.

Would-be buyers already have several homes, he says, and maybe two planes (one for short haul, another for long). The rest of us, however, might have to make do with a night or two in a swanky hotel or a Philippe Starckinspired makeover in the bathroom.

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