Hyatt is one of many upscale hotel brands that has been nosing about for a piece of one of the hottest three-mile stretches of real estate in the country. About a year and a half ago, Hyatt approached the Cosmopolitan to discuss managing the project's 3,000 rooms.

Hyatt, which beat out other hotel companies for the project, will bring to the table a network of 213 hotels in 43 countries and a customer database of several million names worldwide, from frequent business travelers to resort tourists.

"This has got to be the best location in Vegas," Thomas Pritzker, Global Hyatt's chairman and chief executive, said after a groundbreaking event for the resort last week.

The experience of Cosmopolitan developers Ian Bruce Eichner, developer of high-rise condos in New York and Miami, and former Venetian executive David Friedman didn't hurt, either.

"Bruce and David have their heart and soul in this thing," Pritzker said. "We have confidence in their experience, that this would actually get done."

"The concept was right, the people were right and the location was right," he added. "None of us could do any of this alone."

Hyatt's Grand Hyatt luxury brand will manage the Cosmopolitan's 1,000 hotel rooms and lease out units for owners of its roughly 2,000 condo-hotel units. Condo-hotels allow owners to rent their units when not in use.

By Eichner's count, at least half a dozen upscale hotel brands have been jockeying for a spot on the Strip. Yet while travelers like to stay at Ritz Carltons and Marriotts and Hyatts in other cities, Las Vegas is different.

"People don't want to come to Las Vegas and stay at a regular flagged property like a Marriott," Eichner said. "You can do that elsewhere. You're coming to Vegas for some kind of experience."

Lucky for Hyatt, the company was able to meet one of the most important requirements of the project -- that its name not be on the marquee.

That's just one of several unusual aspects of the Cosmopolitan resort. From Day One, the project has stood out among its casino peers on the Strip.

The $1.8 billion project, due to open in mid-2008, is privately owned and financed without help from the financial markets that made Las Vegas megaresorts possible. Its biggest names aren't the developers' but the financing muscle and design architect -- New York hedge fund giant Soros Fund Management and Miami-based Arquitectonica, respectively.

The resort's design is urban Manhattan rather than resort Disneyland: twin glass towers 600 feet high, a glass-fronted entrance and rooftop pool areas and gardens atop a four-level, rectangular building containing the casino, retail, restaurants, entertainment venues and meeting space.

More than 5 million square feet will be built on 8.5 acres surrounding the Jockey Club, an existing timeshare building. That scenario is pure Manhattan -- a place where creative developers have been known to build on tiny sites and around buildings with holdout owners. The 600-foot towers would instantly become among the tallest buildings on the Strip, only a hair shorter than the highest hotel tower, Wynn Las Vegas, at 614 feet.

The resort will front the Strip, with the 700 condo-hotel units in the Beach Club Tower facing Las Vegas Boulevard. The second, bigger tower will front Harmon Avenue, containing the 1,000 hotel rooms and approximately 1,300 condo-hotel units.

In an effusive style particular to name-brand designers, Arquitectonica founding principal Bernardo Fort-Brescia praised the project as unique in Las Vegas.

"It defines the new Las Vegas of this century," Fort-Brescia said. "The building rises with a distinct compositional clarity, in sharp contrast to the cluttered landscape of extraneous themes that dictate the architecture of neighboring casinos. The building is urban as it is the first casino that engages the Strip, creating a boulevard that emerges with an energy and a sophistication tantamount to the boulevards of Paris or New York."

Eichner welcomes the designer's ramblings as a sign of his commitment to the resort.

"You can hire Arquitectonica and not get Bernardo," said Eichner, who believes the building will end up competing for national design awards.

Besides its glass facade and floor-to-ceiling hotel room windows, the Cosmopolitan has other urban features that will no doubt excite New York designer types who like to skewer Las Vegas architecture.

Rather than using precious space for landscaping, the roof deck of the main building will become the 5-acre Cosmo Beach Club featuring dining, a nightclub and "aquatic designs." The deck also will have an "adult playground" ("... or, as my 18-year-old says, 'whatever,' Eichner joked during the groundbreaking event. He declined to elaborate further on what the adult area might entail.)

Some of the rooms, which include 600 square-foot studios and 1,300 square-foot one-bedroom units, have showers and tubs that are separated from bedrooms by glass, making the rooms appear bigger.

The resort broke ground Tuesday, the first of what will become one of the largest excavation projects in Las Vegas history. Perini Building Co. will dig a 90-foot hole that will contain a subterranean parking garage with 3,800 spaces. The main building will sit atop the parking garage.

"If it works, it could really revolutionize Las Vegas," Pritzker said of the resort's design.

Then there's the sales activity. Eichner claims the 1,300 condo-hotel units in the first tower sold out in 120 days -- a Las Vegas record and likely a world record.

These buyers signed contracts and put down 10 percent of the purchase price as a nonrefundable deposit, with the commitment of another 10 percent in nine months. With units going from $500,000 to $1.5 million, Eichner's company has more than $100 million on deposit with Nevada Title Co. About one-third of these folks are California residents.

"In my 30 years of doing this I have never seen anything like it, ever," Eichner said. "This is real, at-risk money."

For all of the Cosmopolitan's grandiose statements, the resort still has a low profile.

It has not received the national press of MGM Mirage's $5 billion, ultramodern CityCenter hotel and condominium complex down the street or of Donald Trump's eponymous condo tower up the road.

Competitors have been mum on the project, both in public and in private. (Eichner said casino companies haven't approached him to discuss the Cosmopolitan.)

And that's OK, the developers say.

"Everyone's been reading about new mixed-use projects on the Strip," Friedman said. "This will not just be the first one, it will be the best one."

Liz Benston can be reached at (702) 259-4077 or by e-mail at benston@lasvegassun.com.