The Carlyle Residences, a 24-story crescent-shaped building in Los Angeles, will have 78 units priced at $2.9 million to $20 million when it opens next summer. More than half of recent new home sales in L.A. have been condos.

LOS ANGELES — Candy Spelling, widow of the television producer Aaron Spelling, is downsizing.

After nearly 20 years in The Manor, a 56,500-square-foot French chateau-style home known for its size and extravagance — it includes a wine-tasting room, a bowling alley, a silver room, a china room and a well-known gift-wrapping room — she says she is ready for the next trophy property: a condominium.

“People say, How can you move from The Manor? There’s no place like it,” Spelling said, sitting in the library with leatherbound scripts of every episode of her husband’s shows, from “Charlie’s Angels” to “7th Heaven.”

But a condo, she said, “is no different than a house, maybe even better.”

Spelling is the most conspicuous buyer in an ultraluxury condo market that is new in the sprawl of Los Angeles, where wealth and fame have usually spelled out “estate,” not apartment living. But real estate experts say a New York-style luxury high-rise lifestyle is creeping into the wealthiest echelons, fed by trends like people looking to own more than one home, foreigners drawn by the weak dollar to invest in Los Angeles, and new residential buildings being designed by celebrity architects like Robert A.M. Stern, Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel.

Stern designed The Century, the 140-unit building under construction where Spelling recently bought the top two penthouse floors — 16,500 square feet — for $47 million.

That’s $2,848 a square foot, if you’re counting.

Los Angeles is becoming a more vertical area at all income levels as land for development becomes less plentiful and traffic congestion, and now high gas prices, steer more people to cluster around mass transit stations and more community-like sections, like downtown and West Los Angeles, said Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the University of Southern California. For 2006 and 2007 in Los Angeles County, condos sold better than single family homes, even as the market was dipping, real estate data shows, although sales above $5 million are still few.

Last year, 59 percent of new home sales were condos.

“The city is becoming more interconnected and growing up,” Conway said. “It’s a major change in the landscape of Los Angeles.”

L.A. goes vertical

And competing to lure the ultra rich out of their grand homes and compounds is a new generation of high-end high-rises, with hundreds of units already under construction or planned that promise a higher level of services and more square footage than the typical luxury condo here, which usually sold for under $10 million. The new pampering, with prices to match, includes restaurants open 24/7, outdoor entertaining spaces and patrols by Israeli-trained security guards to foil the paparazzi.

“It’s a field of dreams,” said Stephen Shapiro, chairman of Westside Estate Agency in Beverly Hills, which represents one of the new condo properties. “Build it, and they hope they will come.”

The Century, a project of Related Cos., the developer of the Time Warner Center in New York, sits on 3 acres of green and offers a 200-foot-long entrance driveway, “meditation cabanas” in the gardens, a wine storage and tasting room and guest suites for home offices or household staff. Units go for $3.5 million to $10.5 million and penthouses for $15 million to $29 million.

Not too far away, The Carlyle Residences, a 24-story crescent-shaped building by Elad Properties, owners of the Plaza Hotel in New York, will have 78 units priced at $2.9 million to $20 million when it opens next summer. Among its offerings are a floor dedicated to staff quarters and hedges monitored by security cameras.

“This is Los Angeles, and the paparazzi problem is so prevalent here,” explained Jill Eisenstadt, a spokeswoman for the project.

But some developers say the ultraexpensive condo market is still a gamble.

“The premium condo market is unproven in Los Angeles,” said Paul Habibi, a developer who also lectures in real estate at UCLA. “Amenities are certainly a draw, but are they any better than what they already have?”

Stern, the architect of The Century, which is going up in Century City, an area with a shopping mall, movie theaters, upscale restaurants and many entertainment offices, said wealthy Angelenos were ready for apartment living as long as they got “that outdoor-indoor type of living.” He said Californians, unlike New Yorkers, felt entitled to space, light and fresh air, which he translated into spacious rooms and big balconies. “People are ready to live in a more urban way,” Stern said. “They’re sick of driving everywhere.”

While the $2,848 a square foot that Spelling paid set a record for Los Angeles, it was still a bargain by New York City standards, where less space in the highest-end condominiums can go for thousands of dollars more than that.

“It gives you comfort,” Shapiro, who handles sales of $20 million and over, said of Spelling’s decision. “Nobody wants to be the first one. She sets the pace.”