Mr. Stern's father, the renowned architect and Yale School of Architecture dean Robert A. M. Stern, whose recent credits in the city include 15 Central Park West and the Brompton at 205 East 85th, designed the house. Seen through glass panels from the leafy backyard, the grand room, with its wide staircase and 21.5-foot ceiling, is, as Mr. Stern said, "dramatic."

His wife, Courtney, who on this July evening was at the family's East Hampton beach house with their three children, is the West Village house's interior designer. Mr. Stern oversaw the project as the contractor, or, as he would say, the builder. Work didn't always go smoothly.

"By all accounts, we should all be dead in some sort of triple homicide that you read about," Mr. Stern said. "You know, site meeting goes horribly awry, wife kills builder husband as he's killing daughter--some sort of Marvin Gaye-type thing. But it was fun."

Mr. Stern, 42, tanned, energetic and slightly graying, was dressed sharply in a gray suit, striped tie, white pocket square and gold cuff links. Before becoming a builder in 2002, he worked for 10 years in the entertainment business, and he carries himself like an old-fashioned Broadway showman. "Hold on," he said, stopping to adjust the lighting before climbing the stairs to the master floor. "I'll turn the light on, get you the full dramatic effect." And when the mood was perfect: "It's what we do--we make dreams," he said, adding, "I promise I'm not trying to date you."

MR. STERN HAD invited The Observer over to talk about his new boutique construction firm that specializes in high-end Manhattan residential projects. He and his small group of trusted colleagues, many of whom he has worked with for almost a decade, are "living the dream" at Stern Projects LLC, he said. "This is the thing that is mine, that I wanted to do all along, and I suppose, yes, I had to do it," he said. "I'm happier than ever."

But it hasn't always been that way.

On March 3 of this year, Mr. Stern resigned from his post as executive vice president of Taconic Builders, the tony development concern. He made some phone calls, and within hours, several of his colleagues had also resigned. In one fell swoop, Taconic lost, in addition to Mr. Stern, vice president Alexander Carey, project manager John Huthwaite, site supervisor Joseph Huthwaite (John's brother), site supervisor Nick Banks, site supervisor Gerald Garry and assistant project manager Kathleen Brosnan.

Taconic responded swiftly. Reeling from what it perceived as an effort "to take over existing Taconic projects," the company filed a lawsuit, accusing Stern et al. of a "calculated surreptitious effort" to sabotage Taconic's business, in alleged violation of noncompete agreements that it said the defendants had signed. The former employees walked out with "trade secrets," Taconic said, after they allegedly deleted emails from Taconic computers and stole valuable clients. Taconic sought restraining orders on the defendants' construction projects, in an attempt to shut down the lead defector and his crew. "Let's say we got divorced and I got the kids," Mr. Stern said, referring to his colleagues. "I guess that makes me Dad or something."

For the previous two months, Mr. Stern had spent nights and weekends setting up a new company that would become Stern Projects. After resigning, all the former employees immediately began work at Mr. Stern's new company. ("They wanted to go camping with me," Mr. Stern said, continuing the divorce analogy.) To Taconic, it looked like a massive suicide pact--some sort of conspiracy. But Mr. Stern denied that there was any such pact. He said he had only mentioned the new company to his close friends Mr. Carey and John Huthwaite. Mr. Stern called the two men "my right and left hand."

"When Nick came to me a few months prior to his departure and said he was leaving to start his own company, I think he got about four words out before I said, 'I'm going with you no matter what,'" Mr. Carey said. "I don't want to say I follow the guy anywhere, but when it comes to business, I needed to follow him."

The group that resigned, Mr. Huthwaite said, was "essentially a company within the company"--not officially, but that's how they behaved.

Mr. Stern said Taconic's lawyer, Richard Menaker, seized innocuous details and turned them into exaggerated allegations. Taconic has a videotape of Mr. Stern packing up "eight years of memorabilia and personal furniture" from his corner office, which Mr. Stern said was the basis of Taconic's claim that he stole, as he called it, "the secret sauce." Mr. Carey and Mr. Stern said that "trade secrets," as the lawsuit calls them, don't exist in construction, since every project is unique.

"We're not coming up with the formula for Coca-Cola here," Mr. Stern said. "Do you know what the trade secret is in construction? Be honest."

Vince Tyer, the president of Taconic, declined comment. In response to the defendants' claim that the lawsuit was based on false premises, Mr. Menaker, the lawyer, said, "If the folks on the other side are making irresponsible remarks, it would be unfortunate."

On June 17, the parties settled. "I don't have time, money or the interest in sidelining the business [Stern Projects] to get into a year and a half of appeals to prove that they are wrong on every count," Mr. Stern said.

He wouldn't disclose how expensive the lawsuit ended up being, saying only that it was "more than our drinks tab here." The drinks were water.

MR. STERN'S UPBRINGING in New York City was, in his words, "very fortunate." His father, now 71, was devoted to his firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, and Nick Stern picked up that discipline. "That compulsive commitment to whatever the task is I got from him," Mr. Stern said. "I think a lot of the lessons I learned I learned by osmosis, and so young I didn't even know I was learning them."

But being the son of Robert Stern also has had more practical advantages. Mr. Stern grew up surrounded by architects and artists. His mother, Lynn Stern, is a photographer, and her husband (Nick Stern's parents divorced when he was a child) is the architect Jeremy Lang. For his current profession, that exposure was an inadvertent but immensely valuable networking opportunity.

Some of the architects Mr. Stern works with (he estimated between 10 and 20 percent) are former students of his father's. He said he has known these architects for 35 years--he grew up around them. And even if they aren't his father's former students, the top architects in the business, Mr. Stern said, have likely met his father at some point, or have at least heard of him. "Everybody I deal with knows of Bob Stern," he said.

"There's probably close to a hundred people out there who remember me as Bob Stern's son making them martinis at age 7 at some fairly boisterous office parties," he said. "This was a type of person that I was just around my whole life."

"In architecture, it's a small world," he added. "Especially the kind of architecture I deal with."

But such an environment also put pressure on the young Mr. Stern. After graduating from Columbia in 1990 with a bachelor's in architecture, he worked for a year in Hollywood before enrolling in the Yale School of Architecture. Ev
en though he said he naturally "can't start something and not finish it," he dropped out of graduate school during his first semester. The school refunded his tuition, a concession that, Mr. Stern said, to this day makes his father, who became dean in 1998, "furious."

"I dropped out because I was 22, an only child and going, 'My God, I finish this program in three years, my father is an internationally known architect, I'm not a wall flower of my own, what do I do?'" Mr. Stern said. "I couldn't figure out that I'd get into general construction, that I had this special skill set, and I'd just shift a little left--which is what I ultimately did."

Mr. Stern said he has more work now "than I've looked at literally in years." The advantage of his new firm's being "small and sort of lithe and lean and mean," he said, is that it can work on a diverse variety of projects. In addition to an Upper West Side "extremely traditional" duplex apartment, he's also working on a "very minimalist, modern" West Village landmarked townhouse renovation.

"It's a stunning design. It's quite large, lots of stone, lots of minimal use of stained wood," he said. "It's similar to mine except the aesthetic is totally different."

Other renovation projects in the works include two Park Avenue apartments (roughly 4,000 and 5,000 square feet, respectively) and three downtown lofts, two of which are in the same building.

As for Taconic, it's a relief to be free.

"I do it my way, which is just exactly my way," Mr. Stern said. "Like Frank Sinatra."

walden@observer.com

Available only to the children of clients worth more than $25 million, the service allows young-adult heirs, whom TILE (The Investment Learning Environment) identifies as between the ages of 15 and 25, to draw money from parent-funded accounts, make investments and engage in "one-click giving" to charities. "Inter-generational wealth transfer is a very big issue for the industry," said analyst Amy Butte, who founded TILE.

More important than the site's actual financial management function is the beneficial effect it's supposed to have on awkward family dynamics. Ms. Butte, who double majored in Psychology and Political Science at Yale, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in March in which she says that talking to children about money is actually more difficult for parents than talking about sex. "Sex or money?" Ms. Butte asks. "Condoms or internal rate of return?"

She had this epiphany, she says, when she saw her finance-savvy husband blunder through a money conversation with her four stepchildren. "Communication is not so hard between the sheets, but when it comes to the topic of balance sheets, some of us are better communicators than others," she writes. It's a pun! "Finance is serious," says the Web site of Spend Grow Give, the TILE service that Citigroup uses.

Not only does TILE make the young heirs feel like grown-ups, but it also makes them feel accepted for who they are. "Spend Grow Give is the only place where young adults can develop their financial lives in a community of people just like them," the Web site reassures. "Our youth-focused approach allows members to feel connected to others while gaining real financial experience in a secure space."

As their numbers increased, the all-male protesters, who had chosen the sidewalk outside RFR's 390 Park Avenue headquarters for their demonstration, set up a speaker system, handed out informational fliers to passersby and hung a large banner across a wooden frame on a flatbed truck: "RFR Realty: Stop Desecrating an Ancient Jewish Cemetery With Your Development in Jaffa." Police officers stood on the other side of the temporary gating erected on the rubber strip in the sidewalk that demarcates the RFR office property line. Security guards for RFR stood outside the building's glass-walled lobby. By 5 p.m., what seemed like hundreds of Orthodox Jews had arrived. By 7 p.m., Rabbinical Congress spokesman Daniel Green estimated that between 7,500 and 10,000 protesters were present.

"I'm just here to make sure they don't go onto RFR," a security guard said.

Rabbi William Handler had some choice words to share with The Observer. He harshly criticized Aby Rosen, who heads RFR with Michael Fuchs, calling Mr. Rosen "arrogant," "pretentious" and "empty."

"I think he rather enjoys the confrontation," Mr. Handler said. "He doesn't realize that people are really laughing at him."

Mr. Handler said Mr. Rosen's "in your face" taste in art--the 390 Park lobby features Mike Bidlo's 2005 piece Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964), an exact copy of an Andy Warhol artwork--exemplifies his general attitude.

The rabbi acknowledged that Mr. Rosen is himself Jewish and that his parents survived the Holocaust. But: "He sounds to me like a rebellious child who turned his back on his father's religion," Mr. Handler said. "He still calls himself Jewish but I don't see what's Jewish about him, except for eating gefilte fish and watching Fiddler on the Roof."

In his speech atop the flatbed truck, coming after Rabbi Hershel Kler's speech in Yiddish, Mr. Handler said Mr. Rosen "seeks to make money over the bodies of our sacred dead." He said Messrs. Rosen and Fuchs had betrayed the Jewish faith, comparing them to Bernard Madoff and saying they worshiped "gelt, gelt and more gelt."

Mr. Rosen did not respond to an email request for comment. But his office sent a statement that both criticized the Central Rabbinical Congress for being anti-Zionist and said its claims were false.

"Every stage of the RFR hotel development in Israel has been reviewed and approved by the applicable government agencies of the State of Israel," the release, dated Aug. 10, says. "Over the past 18 months, we have worked with the Antiquities Authority, the government agency that oversees developments in areas of known archeological significance. The Antiquities Authority oversaw all excavation work at the site. The human remains that were discovered during the Antiquities Authority's excavations were determined to be of Pagan origin, not Hebrew, and were turned over to the Ministry of Religious Services for reburial."

Mr. Green said representatives from the Rabbinical Congress sent two letters to Mr. Rosen and received no response. He said, though, that these representatives spoke to RFR secretaries, who confirmed Mr. Rosen had received the letters, and to Mr. Rosen's son. "Obviously, many phone calls were attempted, but no one was ever put through to Mr. Rosen," Mr. Green said.

The release says Asra Kadisha, a group that has aligned itself with the Rabbinical Congress in protest, has been "harassing its [RFR] employees through the use of inappropriate telephone calls and email. Several death threats and bomb threats are currently under investigation by the NYPD and the District Attorney's Office."

Mr. Handler explained why the thought of building a hotel on top of a Jewish cemetery is so repulsive. "We believe when a person dies that's not the end of life," he said. "Many times people have to come back two and three times to complete unfinished work."

A graveyard, he said, is considered a "house of the living," because "souls hover there." Citing the Kabbalah, a sacred Jewish text, he said, "If you disturb the rest of those who are buried, there are very serious consequences."

Such as? "Plague, earthquake, sickness, economic tragedy," Mr. Handler said, adding that any Jews who do not protest are implicated in the crime.

"Think about Israel," he said. "A nuclear-armed Iran is around the corner. And Hezbollah, and Hamas. This is not a time to be playing with God and giving him the finger."

walden@observer.com

"It wouldn't be my first choice for a title," Mr. Lasry said. "But the song is really good. It's a catchy tune."

So catchy, in fact, that Khloe Kardashian makes a brief appearance in the video, which as of this writing has 8,725 views. "She's so amazing, and we really got to know each other well," Ms. Lasry told Star about Ms. Kardashian. "She really adds a lot to the video and is so friendly."

Ms. Lasry spends much of the video singing into a hairbrush, flipping her hair around and zipping and unzipping her leather vest. Here's what she sings: "Everybody thinks I'm so sweet/ I'm the girl that you love to meet/ Boys want to take me out to eat/ But little do they know I'm a closet bitch."

Later she switches to what aficionados would call an ABAB rhyme scheme: "You'll probably see me smiling/ One of the things that I do best/ I don't get violent/ But I got a right hook if you wanna mess."

The drama really unfolds at the bridge: "Somebody opened up the closet/ They looking at me like, oh, she lost it/ Here she goes again/ Run and tell your friends/ Watch out, I'm a B.I.T.C.H." Tendency to spell out words is a sign of future pop success.

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