Suite dreams are made of this Gold Coast palace

A week at the Palazzo Versace on the Gold Coast will set you back nearly $4000.

And this is a hotel where you don't want to steal the bathrobe or break a cup, although Soheil Abedian won't mind.

"We encourage people to [take a] souvenir," he smiles. "We check the rooms on a daily basis and if anything's missing we put it on their credit cards."

Errant guests will not like the bill: $A3200 ($4120) for a bathrobe, for example, or $A120 for a cup.

The $A200 million Palazzo Versace is the world's first Versace-branded hotel. It's opening for business in September and, officially, in November when the grand opening will draw global glitterati including stars of the magnitude of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For Abedian, a former Iranian merchant who has become one of the most successful property developers on the Gold Coast, the Palazzo Versace has become almost a mission in life, and his intended monument after he has gone.

He took the concept to Italy, ignoring the humiliation of obscurity and the endless waiting for an appointment with Versace management: "You knock on the door of a business that has more than 1240 outlets and turnover of $US1 billion - with only 1.5 per cent of that in Australia - and say, 'Guess what, I have a proposal for you.' And they say, 'From where?"'

Abedian refused to budge for a month, until Santo Versace finally saw the plans.

The result is a 500 sq m courtyard designed in pebbles, each one individually laid by five craftsmen flown out from Italy, average age about 70, the bowed survivors of an almost extinct art.

Abedian's Sunland Group designed the building and Versace added the finesse, using designers whose attention to minutiae made them, Sunland executive Mark Jewell says, almost impossible to work with.

Abedian sees the Palazzo as beyond tourism, more in the iconic realm of the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House.

And he hates, to the point of pleading, the suggestion that it is just another Disneyesque addition to a notoriously tinselly strip of coastline.

"Please, I beg of you, do not sacrifice something I believe in for the sake of journalism," says Abedian.

"Please look above the image of the Gold Coast, the glitzy blond with the fake boobs and things like that."

This is certainly no garden-variety hotel, not with every facet - down to stair rails laser-cut rather than welded - designed to Versace standards, outfitted exclusively by Versace merchandise and charged at Versace rates beginning at $A430 a night and rising to $A4000.

It follows classic Italian palace layout: privately owned wings of condominiums to the right and left, hotel for guests in the centre, overlooking the hotel's marina and the blue of the Broadwater.

The condominiums have been shown only once to journalists, a small group including the Herald, and are otherwise locked away for owners to whom, Abedian says, money is meaningless.

It has to be. The 72 condominiums, floored in Italian marble mosaics and furnished by Versace packages starting at $A250,000, sold for a total of $A98 million and the handful that have been resold before settlement have realised profits of up to $A500,000.

An anonymous New Zealander paid a record $A4.9 million for a penthouse; expatriate Kiwi-cum-Brisbane developer Vaughan Bullivant, with a personal worth of $A130 million, spent $A11.7 million for six apartments.

The hotel, which describes itself as five-star plus, is surprisingly, almost disappointingly, unimposing, and devoid of the glitz the blend of Versace and the Gold Coast tends to suggest.

The style is baroque, with ornate ceilings, colonnades and decorative walls, fitted entirely by Versace, from taps to china to chairs to pictures.

And for a mere $A3000 ($3860) or so, it's yours for a week.