By Anthony Grant

updated 10:46 a.m. ET Jan. 24, 2008

Step inside an “extreme design hotel” and you enter a designer's dream that, for a while at least, becomes your reality. Clean white lines and copycat minimalism are no longer the makings of hip hotels; today, individualism is in. Whether in the shadow of China's Great Wall or rising over the brick sea of Manhattan's Lower East Side, extreme design hotels are so different they electrify the sense of place around them—and they tend to charge you up, too.

A strict definition of the extreme design hotel may be elusive, so it helps to start with its immediate predecessor: the design hotel. Says Ian Schrager, the 61-year-old New York City native who’s widely considered a pioneer of the genre, “I think it’s something that breaks from the norm and is visually provocative, and it doesn’t fit in with the generic, commodified hotels that have been done for the last 50 years.”

With designer Philippe Starck, Schrager broke the mould with Morgans and the Royalton in the '80s. But with his latest venture, the Gramercy Park Hotel, he takes the minimalism that featured so prominently in those hotels and turns it on its head. The 185-room hotel is a collaboration with New York art scene fixture Julian Schnabel, and is eclectic to the max. The lobby is a wholly original interplay of Renaissance colors and diverse textures, from red velvet curtains to reclaimed lumber and a glittering matador’s jacket, and Damien Hirst artwork in the bar. Guestrooms, though resolutely plush, have a soupçon of imperial Spain.

Schrager says his intention with the Gramercy Park Hotel—a renowned literary magnet in its previous life—was to “rethink the genre.” When he first started, his work was the exception to the rule. Then, as happens with pioneers, it became the rule. “A lot of hotels were derived from and predicated upon that kind of [minimalist] approach,” he says. For Schrager, design is just one of the elements that goes into creating a unique experience. “I think there are two priorities, the great service and the great visuals,” he says. “At one point [in the '80s] we might have sacrificed some functionality because we were looking to get a rise out of people and we didn’t want to follow the standards. So now, we’ve learned you can still be visually provocative, but it has to be comfortable, it has to function.” Moreover, he adds, “people are not going to tolerate staying in the coolest place in town unless it also has the best service in town.”

Service may be key these days, but on purely aesthetic levels many hotels continue to push the design envelope. And if design hotels have the kind of innovative touches that corporate chains love to co-opt, extreme design hotels are virtually untouchable in their audacity.

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The Hotel Puerta America is a shining example. At this $94 million, 342-room property, the rage for all things design reaches its apotheosis. Each of its 12 guestroom floors was designed by a different high-profile architect or designer, and the difference between floors is nothing short of, well, extreme. “The idea was to have the work of the best architects in the same building,” says hotel spokesperson Marta Cabello. “They had no limit in the budget or in the use of color or materials, so this was a dream for them.”

Hotel Saint-James One of French superstar architect Jean Nouvel's earlier major commissions was a curiously modern hotel in an unexpected locale: the wine village of Bouliac, outside Bordeaux. And it's an affair as high-tech as Bordeaux's wines are classic.

Among those who worked their magic are rock stars of the design world Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Marc Newson (one of whose chairs, a Lockheed Lounge, sold for $968,000 at Sotheby’s last year). Together yet independently, they crafted a realm of originality that’s difficult to fathom for the uninitiated but easy as pie to appreciate. Consider Newson’s guestrooms, where the beds were conceived as islands wrapped around by cushiony leather and bathroom sinks and tubs carved out of Carrara Statuario Venato marble.

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