The basement swimming pool I saw looked so dystopianly depressing that I expected to see an inflatable fund manager floating facedown. You look at these buildings and all the other imported bendy-glass-and-steel erections, with their tacky design features worn like second wives’ engagement rings, and you wonder who the New New Yorkers think they are. Who’s going to live here? Who are the new, insecure, design-anemic rich?

‘Lifestyle is the way a person distinguishes himself or herself. It is the artistry of living.… Nationality and class have been replaced by lifestyle.” Don’t take my word for it. That’s coming from Ian Schrager, the Buddha of disco, the Confucius of the dirty weekend. Consider that statement: heritage, achievement, geography, and history are all passé. Over. What really matters is your thread count, your iPod menu, and the table they give you. Schrager sent me the glossy self-published book of his gnomic thoughts in a box of Plexiglas wonder, complete with two DVDs. He sent it to my home in Chelsea. Chelsea, London. This tome of gravid aperçu was a brochure—though “brochure” seems too mean a word—for a building at 40 Bond Street that is as yet unbuilt. Prices start at $3.35 million for a 1,269-square-foot one-bedroom.

“This is what I did with my nightclubs and hotels and I intend to do with people’s homes.” Imagine that: coming home and finding a shrieking gay Cuban bouncer with a clipboard on the door; three peroxided trust-fund brats with added silicone bits, all talking at once, locked in the bathroom; and a family from Idaho in town to see The Producers asleep in your bedroom.

On the façade of the new Schrager building there will be a fretwork squiggle made from aluminum. They’re calling it a “sculptural gate.” They’re so pleased with the squiggle pattern, they’ve shaved it into the floors, stamped it on the walls, engraved it in the glass, and put it on the cover of the brochure. They boast that it’s an extrapolation from New York City street graffiti. So, after they clean up the street and move out the kids who do the graffiti, they offer you chic designer graffiti instead. No one seems to have noticed the irony of this or, indeed, seen the writing on the wall. New New York’s design revolution is not meant for New Yorkers. It’s built for New New Yorkers, and they have altogether more suburban, provincial insecurities and private desires.

The look book for hotelier André Balazs’s 40 Mercer comes in the de rigueur box with an added hardback nursery story about Jacques and Jill, a pair of ratlike carry-on dogs who run away from their fashionable, svelte-but-dumb owners to set up home in a new apartment. If that weren’t vomitous enough to make you throw up a Burberry check, the brochure comes with a bell. Now, who spends millions for an apartment on the strength of a fairy tale that goes ding-a-ling? The first thing that strikes you about all the promotional material for New New York is the corpulent waist, the embarrassing profligacy, the utter purple bollocks of it. This stream of smiley airhead literature for the property boom is everywhere, tumbling from the guts of papers and magazines, thudding into the mail, its tone orgasmically perky. The most ubiquitous word is “unique.” Everything’s “unique,” usually decorated and qualified with “luxuriously,” “shamelessly,” “timelessly,” or, my favorite, “one-of-a-kind uniquely.”

The sales suite for 40 Mercer is in the Mercer hotel. The salesperson walks in with a humorless professional smile. She’s not what I expect. Not one of those chain-saw-voiced, neurotically enthusiastic divorcées who have real estate instead of love. This one is the Realtor from a Raymond Chandler novella. She gives me one long, slow-burn look, like a social actuary. In a beat, she seems to sum up my net worth, potential income, status, and I feel myself fall short. No—collapse short. Then she does what we in the Old World call “French flirting,” which is like regular, full-beam flirting, but done to show you what you’re not going to get. Flirting with malice. She shows me her teeth, licks her lips, picks up the clipboard, flashes a wink of cleavage, and we go to see the building.