The image of W Hotel is all about attitude.

Rooms are not decorated; they are visualized. Guests take the words "haute couture" literally, and the staff is, well, stylized – as in well-groomed, right down to the plucked eyebrows and salon-perfected rumpled hair.

Todd R. McQueen/Special (ENLARGE)

The W Midtown officially opens Thursday. Its design focuses heavily on sleek lines and gray and black interiors.

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W is a scene. And by 2009, there will be four Ws in Atlanta. The W Midtown officially opens Thursday, more than a month after welcoming visitors in a soft opening. Locations in Buckhead and downtown will begin taking guests in the next six months. Until now, the only location here has been the Perimeter hotel, in operation for more than a decade.

Only New York City — with five locations — will have more Ws than Atlanta.

So why so much focus on Atlanta?

It's simple, says Frits van Paasschen, chief executive officer of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide — the hotel chain that owns the W brand. Atlanta has four distinct hotel markets, and W wanted to have a share in each, he said.

Perimeter caters to residential and shopping while Buckhead grabs the business crowd and the well-heeled looking to drop cash at Lenox Square Mall and Phipps Plaza. Midtown is where celebrities come to party and lawyers entertain their clients, and downtown brings in conventioneers.

W aims to appeal to the young affluent who are fashion-forward and tech savvy. The closest competitors, said hotel expert Mark Woodworth, are Atlanta-based Twelve hotels and the under-construction Palomar, a Kimpton brand that most argue closely resembles W in style and character.

"Atlanta is certainly a big enough market to sustain each one of these hotels," van Paasschen said. "We see so much growth opportunity here, and we knew this was our opportunity to expand."

The W's expansion comes as Atlanta is seeing an explosion of hotel construction. Dallas-based Rosewood recently opened its luxury brand on Peachtree Street near Lenox Square while St. Regis, one of the most sought-after hoteliers, is building on West Paces Ferry Road. A Loews is under construction in Midtown.

Others either rumored to be interested in Atlanta or on the record for looking for another site in the city include Mandarin Oriental, Hard Rock, Waldorf Astoria, Ritz-Carlton and InterContinental.

W is expanding rapidly worldwide, van Paasschen said. The company recently opened its first European location in Turkey.

Guests at Atlanta's Ws will be able to distinguish them by more than location, however. Each will have a distinctive style, company officials said.

The W Midtown — designed by ICrave — is "techno glam" focusing heavily on sleek lines, "clubby" public areas and gray and black interiors. Buckhead will be more shabby chic, said Mit Shah, head of Noble Investments, the owner of the Buckhead and Midtown locations. The Buckhead W is being designed by Thom Filicia of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" fame.

The downtown W, which will have residences atop the hotel, is being designed to appeal to business people and urban dwellers.

Shah commended Starwood on it vision for Atlanta. Believing that the Sheraton Colony Square and the Crowne Plaza Buckhead — the former lives of the W Midtown and W Buckhead — could be renovated to fit the W model took trust.

"There was a lot of courage" on Starwood's part, Shah said recently over lunch at Spice Market, the Jean-Georges Vongerichten restaurant at the W Midtown. "We had to figure out how to take a concrete box like the Sheraton and make it iconic and we did it. Seeing this is very gratifying."

Woodworth, executive vice president of PKF Consulting Inc., an Atlanta firm that tracks the health of the hotel industry, doesn't think the hotels will have to worry about overlap. The Midtown and downtown Ws have meeting space, a market the company is just beginning to tap.

In fact, the Midtown location has the largest amount of meeting space in the entire W chain. "The physical plant differences will mitigate any overlap in the W hotels," Woodworth said.