Forget the Fillmore, the luxury development on East 11th Street between avenues A and B where apartments sold last year at $1,100 a square foot. Look past One Avenue B, boasting $1.75 million units. Even the high-end buildings between avenues B and C, Skyeast Apartments, with rental penthouses topping $6,000 a month, and 154 Attorney St., which offered free Vespa scooters to some buyers, are of the past.

The new luxury standard in the far East Village is the Flowerbox building, where the triplex penthouse apartment at 259 E. 7th St. recently sold for about $10 million. The luxury building, around the corner from Avenue D, is attracting big dollars to a street that most New Yorkers a decade ago would not have considered even for a stroll.

“This is Perry Street, this is 77th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus,” the lead broker for Flowerbox, Larry Carty of Warburg Marketing, said. Eight loft units in his building, which started at $1.495 million, sold out in three months. The gigantic Lillian Wald and Jacob Riis housing projects down the block are hardly a liability, according to the broker. “So what? You pay 800 bucks a night at the Maritime Hotel, and you’re looking out your window at projects,” he said.

“Buyers weren’t worried about Avenue D,” Mr. Carty said. “If anything, they were saying, ‘Where exactly is that?'”

The developer, Seth Tepper, was browsing real estate offerings when he came across the red brick building at 261 E. 7th St., which happened to be his childhood home. The sellers expected that someone would raze the building, he said. He bought the property for about $2.5 million along with the vacant lot next door for $1.59 million. The lot became the site of the Flowerbox, and Mr. Tepper resold the house he grew up in as a single-family home.

The exterior of the new building is outfitted with self-irrigating flowerboxes, a nod to the neighborhood’s history. “Seth’s parents started a flowerbox association on this block,” Mr. Carty said. “They were involved in the greening of the neighborhood.” Of course, the newer flora comes at a far higher premium.

While many far East Village developments play up the neighborhood’s club and restaurant scene, the Flowerbox’s advertising was notably honest. The project’s Web site pictures “a round of dominos in a tranquil community garden” and “a shape-up at an old-school barber shop. “The block is among the prettiest on the Lower East Side. We didn’t think we were going to con anyone all the way out here,” Mr. Tepper said.

The two men aspire to be something other than gentrifying forces, and claim clients with community-oriented mentalities. “This isn’t the West Village,” Mr. Carty said. “There’s no cupcakes. Real people live here.”

One buyer, Hugo Fisher, an employee of Goldman Sachs, moved from Christopher Street in the West Village because he wanted “something unique or a bit different.” Mr. Fisher loved the area’s friendly serenity and also the building itself, which he described as “bohemian lofts verging on townhouses.”

Construction was partly financed by a couple who bought the penthouse for about $10 million well in advance of groundbreaking — a strategy similar to the one planned for Santiago Calatrava’s much-delayed cube apartment tower at 80 South St. The architects were Derek Sanders and Serge Becker, best known for interior design at the Lever House in Midtown and at Los Angeles’s Standard Hotel. Each apartment in the seven-story structure is a floor-through with huge paned windows and radiant heating throughout. All but two of the units have outdoor space opening into the sizable Green Oasis Community Gardens. Meanwhile, architect Galia Solomonoff who helped design the Dia:Beacon is building a glass extension to the rear of Mr. Tepper’s neighboring childhood home.

A homegrown project in such an extreme location begs the question of whether unprecedented luxury construction can also be contextual. The architectural team claimed to feel welcomed by neighbors whose property values have been sent through the roof. But Johanny Lugo, the owner of Johanny’s Unisex Salon at 51 Avenue C, was less excited: “I can’t even rent a pigeon coop in this neighborhood anymore.” Unswayed by Mr. Tepper’s East Village pedigree, Ms. Lugo asked, “Do you think the area’s worth it? It’s right next to the projects!”

Priced out of Manhattan a decade ago, she suggested that the Wald and Riis projects could include co-ops for local business owners. “People like me need an opportunity to live around here,” she said.

The local City Council member, Rosie Mendez, said she is unhappy to see tenements “going off of rent-stabilized regulation” because of higher rents, but doesn’t think “money is a factor in the desire to be active in community.” She’s said she has seen affluent residents “get involved: They like the multicultural and socioeconomic differences in the district. Everyone is in the streets together.”

Mr. Carty wouldn’t acknowledge even the residue of danger on Manhattan’s easternmost avenue, but focused instead on the city’s coming redesign of the East River waterfront, to be executed by SHoP Architects. The only concession he’d make was to the Flowerbox’s distance from the subway — more than three-quarters of a mile. The issue may betray a truth the broker was loath to admit about his buyers: that their experience, when they become residents this summer, will be far different from that of the average far East Villager. “These aren’t buyers concerned about riding the A, C, E train to work,” he said. “Some people have the luxury of taking corporate cars home.”