“Hello. I’m André Balazs. Do we need helmets?” the hotelier asks briskly, cutting an incongruously dapper figure as he strides across a construction site beside Manhattan’s Westside Highway. Our hard hats on, he walks me through what, later this year, will be the new Standard – the latest of four cool but affordable hotels.

For all-round coolness, it’s certainly in the right spot. We’re just round the corner from the boutique Jeffrey, media-central SoHo House and perennially crowded Pastis restaurant, all of which have helped transform this neighbourhood from what it says on the can – the Meatpacking District – into where the Downtown crowd want to be.

So, this is the perfect spot for a hip hotel – especially one that isn’t so implausibly priced as to be out of most people’s league or beyond the reach of their expense accounts.

“Here’s the beer garden,” Balazs tells me, although, right now, that’s hard to imagine, and “this will be a restaurant, which will look more like one of the other old buildings round here, below the skyline”. But rising above us is the hotel itself. The ground plan is of a flattened V, more or less at right angles to the highway. From street level, what thrills is the way it straddles the High Line, a disused elevated railway shortly to be landscaped and turned into one of the world’s most unusual public parks.

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When we’ve ascended by cage lift to the 15th floor, with Balazs pointing out a bar here and a little club there, what takes you aback is the spectacular view the hotel will command, not just over this, a relatively low-rise section of Manhattan, but across the Hudson to New Jersey and all the way down to Lady Liberty. It’s breathtaking.

He points out another, smaller boutique hotel he’s going to open, and then, smiling apologetically, Diane von Furstenberg’s bedroom – a glass, dome-like structure atop a nearby building, hitherto un-overlooked. It seems the fashion designer, aka Mrs Barry Diller, is being a good sport about it, having installed a kind of tent under the glass to preserve some privacy. But the Standard isn’t about to be overlooked, he explains contentedly. This is pretty much the last available plot in the area, while the surrounding buildings are “landmarked” – a status comparable to our listing.

Balazs isn’t a well-known figure in Britain – not yet, at least. His name, by the way, is Hungarian and pronounced like the first two syllables of Bellagio.

He popped up in the gossip columns because of his on-off relationship – now off – with Uma Thurman. As a collector, he’ll get some attention in the arts press, later this month, when his Maison Tropicale – a kind of prefab and an architectural classic, bought at auction for $4.9 million (£2.5 million) – takes up position outside the Tate Modern as part of a show celebrating the work of French modernist Jean Prouvé further down the Thames at the Design Museum.

Balazs will cement a more permanent connection sometime soon when he opens a hotel here – which, if you’re the kind of person who is excited by such things, is a very exciting prospect indeed. For, as that sneak preview of the new Standard suggests, Balazs’s aren’t just any old hotels and he’s not just any old hotelier, but rather a real-estate developer creative enough to merit being described as one of America’s foremost tastemakers.

Over the years, I’ve spent time (though, sadly, not nearly enough) in most of Balazs’s hotels and they’re all fun, one way or another. Also in New York, at one end of the scale there is the budget QT and at the other, the smart but low-key Mercer in SoHo. In Miami there is the Raleigh, a restored Art Deco gem that has been one of the motors for the transformation of “what was a second-tier American city”, as Balazs puts it, into the super-cool venue for the art-meets-money-fest that is Art Basel Miami Beach, plus another Standard.

On Shelter Island, New York, there’s Sunset Beach, a jeujed-up Sixties motel as groovy as a Herb Alpert track, where, a few years back, I spent one of the great weekends away of my life. Leo DiCaprio was there at the time, but the overall impression was of simplicity, and fellow guests were New Yorkers far too laid-back to be in the Hamptons, sipping cocktails and trading jokes as the sun went down. In LA, Balazs has two more Standards. One is a bling-bling kind

of place in an oil company HQ in Downtown LA. The other, on Sunset Strip, is one of the finest affordable hotels anywhere in the world – hip, certainly, but hospitable, too.

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