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By Manhattan party standards, the opening-night scene inside 344 Third Avenue last May was not unusual. A hot DJ. Fabulous cocktails. A trio of dominatrices in thigh-high, black patent-leather boots and top hats, wielding flyswatters. The only discordant notes were the hour--an unfashionable 7:30 p.m.--and the location itself: the sales office for a new condo development on East 23rd Street. Not exactly Moomba at midnight.

But this wasn't your ordinary Ethan Allen-inspired lobby. A stuffed rhinoceros head surveyed the revelers. The candelabra was of black crystal, the mirrors something out of Alice in Wonderland, the ottoman big enough for a hookah-puffing caterpillar. All were clues, even to those who hadn't bothered to read the invitations, of the iconic design sensibility behind the project.

And, sure enough, at 8 p.m., like a refugee from some other dream, Philippe Starck, dressed in a ratty black nylon Dainese jacket, a pair of tattered jeans, and running shoes without laces, entered the mosh pit. He made one circuit of the room, smiled, did a little jig for the cameras, then disappeared. Half an hour later, another quick tour and poof!--off, we presume, to bed. "I am not a socialite," Starck had told me earlier in the day. "I have nothing to say."

Speak he did. Still, Starck prefers to let his work carry the conversation. And that makes for an odd sort of discourse. This is the man, after all, who has created juicers shaped like spiders, toilet brushes, presidential drawing rooms, and motorcycles. Back in the 1990s, he virtually invented the boutique hotel when he and Ian Schrager did the Delano and the Royalton. Now he's producing lines of furniture for Italian design firms Kartell (including the famous Louis Ghost Chair) and Cassina, as well as for Vitra; lighting for Flos; and watches, glasses, and underwear for Puma (the Starck Naked line). On the side, he designs the odd private yacht and is working on the spaceport (and space suits and space luggage) for would-be patrons of Richard Branson's would-be orbital tourism concern. He even has a line of organic food: rice, olive oil, and Champagne.

But Starck hasn't left buildings behind. Recently, he formed a partnership with Sam Nazarian for a new chain of hotels and restaurants called SLS. The first hotel will open in L.A. in 2008. And then there's Yoo, a development company spearheaded by his partner, John Hitchcox, that has $10 billion in properties in the works in 20 countries, including condos in Buenos Aires, Moscow, Phuket, Sydney, and Tel Aviv. The East 23rd Street location--"Gramercy by Starck"-- is Yoo's third building in the city.

"In all my life, I never speak about design and architecture," says Starck, 58, who somehow seems to combine asceticism with hyper-Romanticism. "I always speak about our life: our fight, our pain, our difficulties, our dreams, our vision, our utopia."

Conversation with Starck is like that. Simple questions somehow wind up prompting riffs on life, love, tribes, omega-3s, and, invariably, sex. It's all delivered with a weary charm: I must talk to you, he seems to say, but I'd rather be sketching a space suit, reading about astrophysics, or shucking oysters.

Listen in.