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"A New Chapter for the Barbizon ", New York Times, © Josh Barbanel, 3/19/06

THE 700 tiny rooms at the old Barbizon Hotel for Women, the romantic neo-Gothic brick-and-sandstone tower on the bustling corner of Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street, were never much to write home about.

The rooms were small boxes with just enough space for a bed, a desk and dresser and one small window (bathrooms were shared). But they served as the sheltered entry point into society, business and the arts in New York for several generations of proper young women. Men were not allowed above the second floor.

Grace Kelly, Ali MacGraw, Candice Bergen and Liza Minnelli stayed in its rooms, but after the last 25 years of use as a conventional hotel, and a series of renovations that obliterated the grand old lobby and some public rooms, there is little left of the old Barbizon — except for the 14 women, all long-term tenants in their 50's to their 90's, who still live there.

Now as the 23-story hotel, like many others across the city, is being converted to condominiums, interior room design has finally come to the fore at the Barbizon. It has become a key element of a plan to create and sell 66 large apartments, giving it a whiff of elegance to suggest the romance and detail and pricing of prewar New York. Prices range from about $1 million for a one-bedroom to $15 million for a 5,300-square-foot duplex penthouse.

The challenge for the developers, BPG Properties, which had until recently operated the Melrose Hotel on the site, and Prudential Douglas Elliman, which created the marketing plan, was to convey a sense of Upper East Side grandeur and pricing on a traffic-choked intersection, on the edge of Midtown, where many rooms lacked the high ceilings of many of the grand old Park Avenue co-ops.

The solution, said Nancy J. Ruddy, a principal of Cetra/Ruddy, the architecture firm, was to develop graceful designs, with a high level of finish work. The building has been draped in scaffolding, while the windows are being enlarged and replaced with French casement windows more than six feet high.

Apartments were designed with foyers and long galleries to create a sense of spaciousness, and deep crown moldings and nine-inch-high baseboard moldings were shaped to give the apartments a feeling of lift and height. Dining rooms and libraries are connected to living rooms and galleries with French doors.

Details, from solid rosewood floors, to limestone flooring in the kitchen, to marble walls in the bathroom, were specified to suggest Old World elegance and give it some marketing appeal, along with touch pads on walls and Web-based tools to control lights, heating and audio while residents are away.

The history of the Barbizon hasn't always been one of show business romance. It was built as a "Club Residence for Professional Woman," in 1927. It took in male residents in 1981 and was renovated over many years to reduce the number of hotel rooms, eventually to 306.

A group led by Ian Schrager bought it in 1988, and set out to turn it into a Manhattan Hotel Spa. It was sold at foreclosure in 1994, but a group led by Mr. Schrager bought it back again four years later. Three floors of space, including the original Barbizon pool, was rented to an Equinox Fitness Club, which is still there. The site was sold to Berwind in 2001. The company converted it into the Melrose Hotel, just as the New York condo market was accelerating.

The condo project, known as Barbizon/63, includes some one-bedroom apartments, but consists mainly of two- and three-bedroom condos. It includes several unusual penthouses: One has a double-height ceiling with light streaming through 14-foot high decorative rosette windows. Another has large terraces surrounded by Moorish arches of brick and sandstone.

The condo also includes several smaller apartments where some of the longtime residents of the hotel still live. In 1980, the hotel had 110 long-term residents. Joseph Nahas, project executive for BPG Properties, an affiliate of the Berwind Property Group, said that several residents took a buyout just before construction began, leaving 14 current residents protected by rent-stabilization or rent-control laws, who will be able to buy their apartments or stay on as renters. Their rents range from $113 to $424 a month, according to the offering plan.