Is it Vikram Chatwal, creator of Time, Dream, and now Night Hotel near Times Square, whom we have to thank for coining the term “hautel”? Sheer genius!

I confess I laughed out loud when I heard it for the first time. That one portmanteau word sums up a whole jet-set crowd that, Mr. Chatwal is betting, will feel quite at home in his sundry establishments.

Surely I don’t have to tell you that the “haute” refers to “couture,” and that Mr. Chatwal’s three hotels in Midtown aspire to sell the supermodel mystique to the expanding universe of people who care about such things. Nor should you be surprised to learn that this hotelier used to date the model Gisele Bundchen.

That fact is in keeping even with the publicity material for Mr. Chatwal’s Dream Hotel at 225 W. 55th Street. The brochure dares to call itself Dream magazine. In addition to room rates and such, it provides features, glossy ads, and essential survival tips for the out-of-towner, by which I mean the location of the closest Manolo Blahnik shop.

Mr. Chatwal’s hotels underscore an interesting revival of the Midtown area’s hospitality industry. One of the grimiest parts of the city, Midtown west of Fifth Avenue is seeing an impressive increase in hotels, most of them self-consciously boutique-y in the manner pioneered by Ian Schrager and Andre Balazs. If the big real estate story of 2005 was the transformation of some of our most luxurious hotels, like the Plaza and the Stanhope, into residences, then this year’s story is the emergence of boutique hotels that absorb the rooms that have been lost further uptown.

The latest of Mr. Chatwal’s hotels, Night, is just across the street from QT, which opened last year with designs by Lindy Roy, and a block away from Muse Hotel, the recent confection of David Rockwell.

Night is probably the best of Mr. Chatwal’s New York establishments. One of the first hotels to enshrine the Goth aesthetic, it presents to the world a Victorian facade covered in charnel black paint so intense and so thickly applied that it resembles the charred remains of a cremation. To this is added at street level a series of wrought-iron gates and a massive black monolith of a door. Running down the length of the six-story facade is a taffeta banner emblazoned with a single Gothic “N,” which covers most of the windows.

I wonder how visitors will feel to find themselves so emphatically cut off from the external world. It is almost as though the proprietor and his designer, Mark Zeff, had decided to embrace and exploit Midtown’s severely limited lighting and its sense of cramped enclosure in such a way as to give cultural relevance to the building.

The interior is a rewarding study in black and white, with few color accents, and a dash of gray in the restaurant at the back. In the midst of this relentless checkered pattern, a curved glass canopy over the lobby leads you to the reception area. Here is another surprise, a wall full of black and white books in alternation. The rooms, with their sumptuous queen- and king-size beds, repeat this pattern, down to the inevitable flat-screen TV, the bedclothes, and the grayish shower stall. The only bedroom I was shown (all the others were occupied) was on the second floor and faced an airshaft glimpsed through a dark gray shade and a window that didn’t open. Far from detracting from the overall effect, it seemed to enhance a sense of modish entombment that the designer may have been seeking.

Despite Night’s eccentricities, there are similarities with Mr. Chatwal’s other hotels. The oldest of the three, Time, designed by Adam Tihany, is the least successful as it falls short of that totalizing conception whereby a boutique hotel subordinates each particle of itself, and each moment spent in it, to the enactment of a given “lifestyle.” Still, the cramped spaces and the preference for stairs leading to and away from the lobby recall both Night and Dream.

The latter, which opened in 2004 and was also designed by Mr. Zeff, is a great step forward. Far more theatrical in its enthusiasms, its lobby consists of an impressive expanse of vaguely neoclassical details, a floating galleon, a massive two-story tropical fishbowl, and, presiding over the whole affair, a statue of the enthroned Catherine the Great, two times larger than life.

As with Night, a long, curved canopy leads to the reception area, behind which is a row of books, this time all black. More striking still is the Dream Lounge, a mod extravaganza whose densely serried candycane stripes run rampant through the place, along the carpets and up the pillars that command the center of the room. This pattern is echoed in the hallways leading to rooms on the upper floors.

For all that, Mr. Chatwal’s three Midtown hotels do not exhibit the rich brilliance of Philippe Starck at his best. The doyen of boutique hotels, Mr. Starck is responsible for Hotel Costes in Paris, Hotel Faena in Buenos Aires, and the Hudson Hotel on 58th Street, just west of Columbus Circle. I suspect that, in each case, Mr. Starck had far more money to play with, as is evident in the quality and the manic exactitude with which he has given life to his dreams.