THE MANHATTANIZATION OF BOSTON

Yankees vs. Sox. Jets vs. Pats. New York Marathon vs. Boston Marathon. Central Park vs. Boston Common. MoMA vs. ICA. Luxury condos with great views of the Manhattan skyline at $2,000 a square foot and up vs. views of Boston Harbor at $1,000 a square foot and up. It’s one more chapter in the Big Apple vs. the Hub of the Universe, for those who revel in the competition. New York has led the way in super-luxury high-rise living. But elite lifestyles in little old Boston are catching up.

“The Boston market typically tracks the New York market by a three- to four-year delay,” says Brian Fallon, developer of the new InterContinental Boston Hotel and Residences at the InterContinental, which opened in November. “It’s really only this last round of projects that have had a fully edited, refined design sense relating to the interior, coupled with full services akin to a five-star hotel.”

The buyers of these units, which typically cost more than $1 million for a small one, are looking not only for aesthetic flourishes – woodwork, marble, chrome – but also for convenience. Whether still engaged in busy lifestyles or in retirement, they want kitchens with the latest gadgets, health clubs an elevator ride away, and concierge or even full hotel-style services. According to Kevin Ahearn, president of Otis & Ahearn, which markets the InterContinental and other luxury condos, the buyers here are no different from those in New York. “It started with empty nesters, but it’s expanded to young professionals and everything in between – very affluent, financial services, entrepreneurs, family money, a little bit of international, all of the above.”

The trend began with the residences at the Ritz-Carlton Boston (now the Taj Boston) in the early 1980s and, later in that decade, expanded with the Four Seasons Hotel Boston and its 100 condos on top – which, by the way, sold slowly. The Heritage on the Garden in 1988 was the first in the city to offer a host of services – ranging from 24-hour concierge presence to valet parking to room service delivered from a restaurant on china – without attaching them to a hotel. Developer Ronald M. Druker says he checked out New York when working on designs for the Heritage, which, like the Taj and the Four Seasons, overlooks the Public Garden. “I went to visit Cesar Pelli’s Museum Tower and also The Dakota, which was built in a prior century. They had everything from dog walking to taking packages to looking after your goldfish, as it were.”

If Boston’s trend toward high-end, full-service living caught fire in the 1980s, it took a break well into the 1990s, when the economy fizzled. During that time, luxury and money clung to the town houses in the Back Bay or the handsome old brick buildings on Beacon Hill.

But the spark survived, and Trinity Place and The Belvedere, both in the Back Bay, are more recent additions to the growing list of elite Boston addresses. And now the heat is really on. The 130 upper-floor residential units in the InterContinental, located between Fort Point Channel and Atlantic Avenue, feature Sub-Zero refrigerators and Azul Guanabara granite in the kitchens, Omnia stainless-steel doorknobs, and Duravit Darling pedestal sinks in the powder rooms. Those are in addition to the eye-popping views of Boston Harbor and catered dishes like the Burger Trilogy from Miel, the hotel’s Provencal restaurant.

The Residences at Battery Wharf, which are opening in the North End later this year, will be attached to the Regent Boston hotel, with a restaurant overseen by French chef Guy Martin. Many of the units will have balconies and terraces, and a marina is available for the yacht. A 31-story tower, 45 Province Street, is going up on the site of a parking garage near Old City Hall. It won’t have a hotel, but it will be “full service,” with room service from a restaurant below, plus a health club and pool. The marketing office is already open around the corner on School Street, with a full-scale model of a living room and kitchen – and expansive wall-covering photographs representing the views that residents will have from most of the condos. The living units will have Miele appliances, bamboo kitchen floors, and ceramic tile spaced with glass inserts on bathroom floors. The showers are 4 feet by 6 feet – so large they don’t require doors.

“I just went to New York a couple of weeks ago to check on finishes and things,” says M. Diane Maloney, president of the Marketing Group of New England Inc., which is selling the 150 units at 45 Province Street. Designers and marketers keep up on what’s happening in other hot urban areas, like New York, and collect ideas. “I visited six or seven projects down there,” Maloney says, including the Barbizon, once a genteel residential hotel for women, now luxury residences.

Two prime examples of the high life downtown have been opened by Anthony Pangaro, a developer with Millennium Partners Boston, associated with Millennium Partners LLC, a nationwide company based in New York. The first is One Charles, a 233-unit complex behind the Four Seasons Hotel. The other is the Ritz-Carlton Towers, two Manhattan-like glass high-rises on Boston Common, one with a top-name hotel under it, and both served by the hotel. “This is good thinking,” says Pangaro, who worked on the Four Seasons project in the early 1980s. “I was trying to make a clear statement about service as part of a living environment. Sales in older condos in Beacon Hill and the Back Bay are not keeping pace, because there is no service.”

The gold standard, most acknowledge, at least of the current crop of over-the-top accommodations, will be the residences – both apartments and condos – at the Mandarin Oriental Boston Hotel, now being erected at the Prudential Center on Boylston Street. Although many of the units are being customized, the “basic finishes” for the 50 units include hand-hewn mahogany entry doors, vent-free gas fireplaces, polished granite countertops and backsplashes in the kitchens, Thermador ranges, and, in the bathrooms, onyx marble countertops, Albi limestone floors, and bidets.

“It’s definitely a trend that’s happening in major cities, and Boston is clearly a major city – one of the major port cities, which is even more important,” says Stephen Weiner, a partner in the Mandarin Oriental project. “Although it’s always had the best healthcare, the best education, the city has grown dramatically because of the world of finance. People are more willing to express their success, and one of the most obvious ways is through their homes.”

According to LINK, a service that tracks residential sales, the number of condominiums in Boston selling for between $2 million and $5 million almost doubled from 2000 to 2005, going from 48 per year to 91. Last year, a slowing economy took its toll, and the number dropped to 75. The number of sales over $5 million averaged four per year from 2000 to 2005, but many of the really expensive units in the projects that are still just steel skeletons are under purchase-and-sale agreements for big numbers. Because the sales haven’t closed yet, they haven’t been recorded. “The Ritz Millennium building is obviously very New York,” says Anisia R. Gifford, a Hammond Residential sales associate who now spends most of her time as an interior decorator. “They were building one in New York while they were building that one.

“It’s really indicative of what’s happened to Boston’s image in the past 20 years,” says Gifford, who worked in New York and returned to Boston in 1987. “Boston’s always been known as being cultured, but it’s much less the kind of musty, tweedy-coated university stereotyped image than it was.” Gifford says her aunt, who has lived on New York’s Gramercy Park since 1956, visited Boston a few years ago and was surprised. “She said, ‘Oh, Boston has Hermes. Boston has St. John.’ I think all aspects of its image have moved away from the incredibly conservative Bostonian to more of a cutting edge. You definitely see it in the interiors.”

Ahearn, of Otis & Ahearn, says he sees no end. “Door heights are getting higher. In the past, you could do a 6-foot-8 door. Now it’s 7 and 8 feet.” Ceiling heights used to be 8 feet in the priciest new places. “Now it’s 9 to 10.” Some of the developers pushing up those ceiling heights – and prices – say it’s not a “Manhattanization” trend as much as an international thing, or at least the Europeanization of Boston: the world getting smaller, Boston waking up to what’s possible.

Francois-Laurent Nivaud, who with developer Harold Theran is building the Battery Wharf residences and hotel, says he read a story in the paper recently about a group of young executives in Europe buying a $45,000 bottle of wine. “The excess is not good,” he says, “but the search for quality services and products, that’s life, that’s evolution. We are becoming a society of – you raise the purchasing power, you raise the quality of life. That’s wonderful.”

Gifford says that she loves to shop and would like to move from her suburban home into the city, to take part in that Manhattan-like lifestyle that has crept to the north. But, she says, “unfortunately, it is also adopting the Manhattan prices.”

Thomas C. Palmer Jr. covers real estate for the Globe. E-mail him at tpalmer@globe.com.