The New Hamptons?

Bashaw and Colleen started to put together “mood boards” for each room and public space — tear sheets from magazines, old photos, swatches of fabrics and pictures of specific light fixtures and pieces of furniture — back in ’06, and to throw around words like “old Hollywood” and “vintage” with great enthusiasm. They knew that their market enjoys luxury, so there will be attentive valet parkers, a sleek lobby, inviting lounges, fantastically cushy bed linens. The colors chosen for the hotel reflect, and drive forward, the style zeitgeist: aubergine, pink and mint green, and a pink-and-white scheme for the ballroom.

BACK ON-SITE at the Chelsea, everyone steps out of the elevator onto the currently gutted fifth floor, which is the party heart of the hotel in the old Holiday Inn tower. To the left will be Chelsea Prime, a branch of Starr’s Barclay Prime, decorated with oversize booths, vintage Atlantic City photos, a white piano, and a black ceiling with white cutouts and crystal chandeliers, with floor-to-ceiling ocean views. To the right are three distinct spaces for drinking and flirting: the Bar (paneled in brown velvet), the Game Room (mirrored fireplace, a vintage pool table) and the Terrace (old-Hollywood style, with rattan ceiling and zebra print everywhere — “You know Colleen and her animal prints,” says Bashaw). The three lounges wind around to the fifth-floor pool, with a Château Marmont-Setai-ish vibe.

Again, the emphasis on cozy sophistication throughout what Bashaw calls the hotel’s “gathering spaces” is strategic. Chelsea customers expect style over glitz, and so the Chelsea’s Sea Spa, and its lounges and pools, needs to be much more intimate and cooler than the outsize bars and clubs that dominate Atlantic City. If the mood at the Chelsea calls to mind a weekend in Nantucket with a dollop of South Beach sizzle, its gathering spaces need to work whether you’re there to flirt over champagne or want to dive onto a sofa for a post-beach soda with your sandy five-year-old.

The Chelsea’s ground-floor lobby and check-in area will flow into the 7,000-square-foot Sea Spa and Teplitzky’s, a casual Starr restaurant named for the HoJo’s original owner. The ’60s-inspired bar and restaurant is similar in concept to Philly’s Jones — again, by design, since it’s hard to get a five-year-old to sit through cocktails at Chelsea Prime. To accommodate guests of varying budgets, Bashaw has essentially kept the division between the HoJo (built in the ’50s) and the Holiday Inn (circa 1980) in place. In the old HoJo, he’s taking advantage of the I Love Lucy-era architecture and details and calling the guest rooms “Chelsea Lite,” giving them a less pricey and more casual update than the Holiday Inn’s new “Chelsea Luxe” incarnation. With their funky iron-railed balconies, the Lite rooms will face a second, ground-level pool, where towering arborvitae will block the neighboring Econo Lodge in an oh-so-chic way. (“We tried to buy it,” Bashaw admits of the pesky Econo Lodge.)

Despite their Hamptons-y mien, the Bashaws know their way around the Shore. In his first months at the CRDA, Bashaw was met with skepticism, but his quick successes — he took a percentage of casino taxes and completely remade and beautified the Boardwalk, to universal acclaim — won over the gritty A.C. crowd. Bashaw can handle, say, negotiating for an Econo Lodge; he gets along great with the unions, and back at the car dealership-cum-construction office, he jokes around with a couple of union officials. Bashaw is genuinely fond of A.C. and its quirks — he likes the pizza and subs at Tony’s Baltimore Grill, and he’s happy to be adding more than 500 jobs to the town, much as he’s done in Cape May.