In a bid to burnish its St. Regis brand, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. hired the former chief executive and management team of the high-end Rosewood Hotels & Resorts.

Atef Mankarios and five hotel executives with whom he left Rosewood three years ago to build his own hotel company in Dallas will be charged with "aggressively growing" the nine-hotel St. Regis chain into the "world's No. 1 luxury-hotel brand," Starwood said.

The hiring of Mr. Mankarios and his team comes after last week's opening of two St. Regis properties -- a resort in Orange County, Calif., and a business hotel in Shanghai, China. Analysts said the hiring signifies a stepped-up effort on the part of Starwood to put St. Regis into a more competitive position against the luxury hotel chains Ritz-Carlton, which is mostly owned by Marriott International Inc., of Washington, D.C., and Toronto's Four Seasons Hotels Inc.

"Atef is one of a tiny handful of people out there who really knows how to operate a deluxe-end hotel business," said Bjorn Hansen, head of PricewaterhouseCoopers' hospitality practice. Starwood Chief Executive Barry Sternlicht "is really making a statement about the company's commitment to building the St. Regis brand."

Solidifying an identity for the St. Regis brand is a task that Starwood has attended to only intermittently since acquiring the original St. Regis Hotel in New York when it bought the Sheraton hotel chain in 1998. Starwood, which owns more than 700 properties world-wide, has been preoccupied with the sale of its Ciga group of European hotels and the expansion of its hipster-friendly W Hotels chain. The White Plains, N.Y., company's strategy of converting its highest-end properties into St. Regis hotels hasn't always panned out; it converted the Phoenician resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., into a St. Regis, only to revert that property back to its original name.

Bryan Maher, a lodging analyst at Credit Lyonnais Securities, said Mr. Mankarios's main task is to build critical mass -- at least 25 hotels -- before St. Regis is taken seriously as a competitor to Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons.

The Egyptian-born Mr. Mankarios, who began his career at Rosewood in the 1980s as manager of its Mansion on Turtle Creek hotel in Dallas, became chief executive of the 13-hotel chain in 1989. He is best known for engineering the 1989 sale of the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles to a group of Japanese investors for a record $1.2 million a room. Mr. Mankarios left Rosewood shortly after Maritz Wolf Partners bought a controlling stake in that company in 1998. He started Foresthills Hotels & Resorts in 1999 with financing from Apollo Real Estate Advisors LP. Mr. Mankarios has agreed to dissolve Foresthills, which manages three hotels.

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