Stern also stresses the point of entry; at the Chatham, he's installed a modest oval lobby reminiscent of the one in the Carlyle. The black silk throw pillows at the sales center -- they'll make their way onto one of the lobby's settees eventually -- have been sewn up in a diamond pattern that matches the ornamental grillwork on the front door. "I said to both clients, 'Let's have a quiet lobby; let's prepare people for their apartments,' " Stern says. "It shouldn't be a broken-field run through a marble hall. Lobbies should be small and intimate, like living rooms for the buildings."

Stern tinkered with the developer's standard plans, adding details that his mansioneer clients appreciate. He picked a neutral palette for the bathrooms, adding the wide molding that rings the rooms, and started the living-room windows a foot below the ceiling line (so that curtain rods and valances can't be seen from the street).

"The kitchens reflect the kind of kitchen I've done in people's houses -- nicely appointed, white and black, not an assault by all the different kinds of marbles you can buy in the world. I want the most important thing in the room to be you, and if not you, your vegetables," says Stern.

As soon as the Chatham is finished, the brownstone housing the restrained kitchen-and-bath showroom will be demolished to make way for the Chatham's garage. But the faux home seems to be working -- in one month, 50 percent of the Chatham's 94 units have sold, and while no one has actually offered to buy the sample kitchen's striking black-and-white wicker table and chairs, or the Calvin Klein glasses, Stern's carefully styled stage set is doing half the agents' work for them.

Until the late sixties, when funding dried up, an architect's first commission was occasionally federally funded housing. Le Corbusier did it in Marseilles; Richard Meier did it in the Bronx. It's a building type that Stern and Graves undoubtedly studied in school, but they were unable to find anyone who wanted to pay for their thoughts -- until now. If the Seville and the Impala rent swiftly, Davis says, he'll hire more name architects. The Related Companies may soon be branching out from postmodernists: The company is talking to a list of modern architects, selected by Cooper Union's architecture faculty, in a competition to design a boutique-hotel-and-cinema complex that will go up in the parking lot next to the Public Theater.

In this brave new, celebri-designed world, "the buildings will have different personalities and aesthetics," Stern says. "To quote Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, 'Not only do they have names; now they have faces.' "

Related:

• Archive: “Cover Story”
• Articles by Alexandra Lange
• Table of Contents: Apr 12, 1999 issue of New York | Subscribe!