Shvo Motion

Tabula Rasa Michael Shvo on the East River, Long Island City. He plans to carve out a piece of the skyline for himself. And he just might pull it off.

Related Stories

• Top O' The Market: A Consumer's Guide

We're riding uptown from 20 Pine in Shvo's chauffeur-driven black Mercedes S500, and Shvo, as ever, is checking his BlackBerry messages while chattering into his cell. Except this is no deal in the works. It's his parents, calling from Israel, to wish their son a happy new year. After a few minutes of animated conversation in Hebrew, he snaps the phone shut: "My mother wants me to get married this year."

It could happen. (He and his girlfriend live in the upper reaches of the Time Warner building overlooking Central Park.) But Shvo can't keep his mind on weddings today, when there's so much opportunity passing by his window. "See this 50-story building? Hotel-retail-condo--we brought Daniel Libeskind to the table." "We're doing a building in the middle of this block in two years." "See this building? We just completed that one." "That one? The Peter Som building? I said from day one that it wouldn't work." What about Balazs's new affluent-horndog project, the William Beaver House? "Balazs's brand doesn't work for a 400-unit building. If I was advising André, I'd tell him to stay true to his brand, which is taking quirky little properties and making them really chic."

We pull over in the middle of a dusty block on West 18th Street--"Central Chelsea," apparently, a designation that's a function more of marketing than cartography. The elevator is being repaired, so we climb to the second floor, to a small sales office lit by a vaguely Moroccan lighting fixture. This is the Jade, a building rescued from obscurity by its connection with Jade Jagger, Mick's lissome spawn, who's forging an identity for herself as a jewelry and fashion designer.

We step into an empty room; a heavy beat kicks in. And suddenly, there's Jade herself, in full IMAX mode, stepping off the curb, as a 360-degree streetscape plays out on all four walls. "I'd like to introduce you to a new concept in urban living," she says. "One that's very personal to me. A place that a modern nomad like myself can call home."

Evidently, Jade's nomadism is largely confined to New York, London, and Ibiza, and her building borrows heavily from each, with a Mediterranean rooftop terrace where the kids can poach in "soaking tubs," a sort of Aladdin's-Oasis-meets-the-Garment-District. Lucy Liu is said to be interested.

The Jade opened for business in July, typically a sleepy time for sales. But in eight weeks, Shvo swears, his team had moved 35 of the 56 units. "We sold more apartments in the last month and a half than were sold in a year across the street," he says. Without dropping prices, of course.

The question now becomes, How many ways can you slice a market? Once you've aggregated the Wall Street fat cats, the holistic health fanatics, the randy twentysomethings, the kid-focused families, the West Side culture mavens, the starchitecture snobs, what's next? Condos for pet-loving Egyptologists? Stamp-collecting oenophiles? When does it stop being a clever marketing segmentation strategy and start sounding a little silly?

Steele, for one, is watching closely: "The next 18 to 24 months will tell us if Shvo's really onto something, or whether he's simply the fulfillment of an age when real estate was selling itself--and where, as long as everything was going to sell, you may as well get a premium for yours by making it a little shinier than the next guy's."

Already, not all of Shvo's projects are so crisply defined and hotly desired. Sales at 8 Union Square South, a luxury building where large condos sell for $1.89 million to $8.9 million, have been less brisk than at 20 Pine or Jade. And its positioning, "A park to call your own," has inspired some sniggers from locals who know the area is less Central Park than it is a piebald tract overrun with Filene's Basement shoppers, skater kids, and opiated indigents.

But Shvo is getting a little bored with Manhattan anyway. As his shrink might say, it's time to move on. And he already has a range of projects on the boards: the Cancún project (in partnership with the GHM Hotels--the folks behind the Setai in Miami and the Legian in Bali); a billion-dollar mixed-use project in Houston; and a $750 million resort in the Turks and Caicos.

And then there's Long Island City--Shvo's own personal Tomorrowland. It's a chilly December night, and we're back in his car, moving slowly over the Queensborough Bridge into Manhattan. It's warm and dark in the back seat, when Shvo starts murmuring sweet nothings into my tape recorder. "The beauty is that Long Island City has no brand, it's nothing. And nothing is a great place to start," he says, his passion rising. He wants nothing more than to rebrand the place, he says, starting with a skyline worthy of Chicago. Boat slips. Parks. Cafés, supermarkets, schools. "Here, I can put up the most beautiful building in the world, and it's not just another building in a busy skyline. Here, I can create anything I want!"

Five years from now, he says, "we'll sit on the Manhattan side and say, 'My God, look at this. It's pretty damn cool."

It's a dazzling vision. Until I recall what one marketer told me about peddling luxury real estate: "What we focus on is that moment of truth when a customer walks into our property and goes, 'Wow!'" he'd said. "It's like falling in love. In that millisecond, the value spike goes poof!"

I, apparently, am just another seductee. And Shvo is the man behind the curtain, waving veils and blowing musk.

"That," he says, "is what we do."