overnight sensations; Christian Lacroix and Philip Treacy are the latest designers to check into the world of boutique hotels.

Byline: Lynn Yaeger

Hotel du Petit Moulin, Paris

Feeling like an ecstatic hummingbird winging in its gilded cage, I am swooping around my beet-red room at the Hotel du Petit Moulin in the Marais, marveling at the touches the hotel's designer, the notoriously color-mad couturier Christian La-croix, has seen fit to ensconce in my room: flocked crimson floral satin walls with leaves shaped like lozenges, a rug whose pattern is a riot of dominoes, a mural of something that resembles exploding coral behind my bed. All the room lacks, really, is an armoire full of Lacroix chiffons instead of my painfully limited travel wardrobe.

I've eased into this scarlet bower gradually. The previous night I followed the dimly lighted polka-dot hall carpet to a pale-green chamber with a massive antique heart-shaped mirror and a pair of Eames chairs with deep-purple cushions. Now, lying under my pansy-printed coverlet, I reflect on designers' newfound desire to enter the hospitality business.

Perhaps this development is not really so surprising. After all, how much of a leap is it from clothing boutique to boutique hotel? These days, designers often see themselves more as _lifestyle-branders than mere frockmakers, and a glorious signature home-away-from-home is apparently pretty hard to resist. The Ferragamos have already opened a quintet of hotels in Florence; the folks at Versace-who recently, not so coincidentally, announced their willingness to decorate your private plane-are also old hands at the hotel business; Alberta Ferretti has a place in Cattolica on the Ad_riatic coast; Giorgio Armani is working on a veritable chain of inns; Roberto Cavalli is contemplating what one assumes will be a posh den of iniquity; the Missonis are getting ready to jump in with both feet (fingers crossed for flame-weave multicolored comforters); the madcap Betsey Johnson now runs Betseyville, a guest house on the Mexican Pacific; and, of course, there's the Chanel suite at the Paris Ritz, a vast expanse that even features double-C-printed bathmats. (What next? Will we soon see a Hotel Comme des Garcons, with a mysterious lump in the middle of the bed and shredded black polyester curtains?)

I meet Lacroix in the hotel lobby, across from an alcove that I first think is a tiny library but is actually a nook lined with trompe l'oeil books. "Since the neighborhood has a lot of galleries," he tells me, "I thought we'd have people connected with art and fashion. I wanted it to be not such a serious hotel." Lacroix-who'll be designing a hotel that will open on the Rue de Bellechasse next year-is clad in jeans, a pullover, and sneakers, set off to spectacular effect by a massive ponyskin carryall. "Lacroix, bien sur," he says when I inquire as to its provenance.

Lacroix admits that part of his desire to remake in his image this hotel, a former nineteenth-century boulangerie, stems from his being a bit of a frustrated set designer. "It was like doing something for the stage, something in between a movie and a short play," he says, describing the seventeen rooms, no two alike, as "very grand, very naughty, or very girly. Everything I had no time or no money for in my own home I did here."