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Instagram Central: At the Post Oak Hotel, a spiral staircase offers a stunning view of the plant wall behind the Rolls Royce dealership.

At H Bar, the dark watering hole off the Post Oak Hotel's lobby, you could drop $80,000 on a bottle of Chateau Gruaud-Larose Saint Julien from 1825.

At H Bar, I had an impeccable Last Word cocktail of gin and Chartreuse.

At the 29° North boutique, if you have to ask what it costs... well, you know the rest. At least the staff will be nice to you anyway.

The marble bathroom. The soaking tub, complete with TV. The fluffy, fluffy robe.

The chandelier in the lobby, we're told, has a twin in Dubai.

In the guest rooms, a billionaire's view.

The girls in their summer dresses scrunch together in a pastel row, smiling for a friend’s cameraphone.

Above them towers — there is no other verb for it, really — a mammoth explosion of impossibly fat red roses, 700 of them in one of the twin urns alone, crowned with purple spikes of liatris shooting toward the lofty ceiling and tentacles of apple-green amaranthus snaking downward. All that’s missing is the White Rabbit and the Queen of Hearts.

This is Houston’s Instagram Central in the summer of 2018: the mind-bending marble lobby of the brand-new Post Oak Hotel. A gargantuan Frank Stella sculpture tilts vertiginously from a wall, popping with graphic lines and swirls in yellow and orange, blue and green. A madcap settee twists upward toward a three-story chandelier dripping pearlescent blown glass and Swarovski crystals.

I am told this chandelier, which resembles some giant off-world jellyfish, has a twin in the Dubai Opera House. I don’t doubt it.

We’re talking a hotel scene that hasn’t had an equal in Houston since wildcatter Glenn McCarthy opened the Shamrock in 1949. Not even the posh Remington (now the St. Regis) back in its 1980s heyday, or the calculatedly avant-garde ZaZa in 2007, have drawn such avid early crowds. Houstonians of all stripes are flocking to ogle this disorienting Wonderland crafted, detail by opulent detail, according to the slightly maniacal standards of the city’s most inescapable billionaire.

Tilman Fertitta, surveying his empire (or at least the hotel's lobby), in March.

That would be Tilman Fertitta of the Houston Rockets franchise, which the 61-year-old entrepreneur bought last October for an NBA record $2.2 billion. He of the Landry’s group that has expanded under his leadership from a small regional Cajun restaurant chain to a national behemoth that encompasses dining, hospitality, entertainment and gaming ventures in Vegas, Lake Charles, Biloxi and Atlantic City. He of the CNBC “Billion Dollar Buyer” reality show, in which he auditions products from hopeful small businesses angling for an order.

Maybe they’ll end up like Designer Drains, whose Season Two slogan was “jewelry for your shower.” Fertitta challenged them to design a linear drain and, after some jockeying over the price, purchased hundreds for his new luxury hotel. On a recent afternoon I stood staring at one of them, a silver bar inscribed with “The Post Oak,” and etched with the outlines of two spreading Post Oak trees, the hotel’s logo.

I was inspecting the lavishly tiled shower of my standard Luxury Guest Room, where I spent two nights — unannounced and on the Chronicle’s tab — and then, reluctant to leave this scale-shifting, larger-than-life universe, extended my stay a night on my own nickel. The Friday night I paid for myself was the cheapest: $332 plus tax (don’t ask). Midweek Wednesday and Thursday rates, geared more to business traffic, cost $413 and $386 pre-tax, respectively.

Fertitta has been explicit about his ambitions for the hotel — he’s hoping to win a hard-to-get Forbes Travel Guide five-star rating — and about the money Landry’s has poured into it. There’s way more personal prestige on the line here than can be gleaned from his various casino hotels and Galveston inns.

Fertitta has said they’ve spent about $1.1 million on each of The Post Oak’s 250 guest rooms, and costs have reportedly run something like $400 million so far. There’s still some wrangling over the construction totals: the Tellepsen company and other contractors recently filed $30 million in liens against the hotel, asking to get paid. Meanwhile construction continues on the spa, the wine cellar and an elaborate, sky-high, private club, where by-invitation memberships will cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Even the awkward hotel motto hints at the fierce competitiveness Fertitta has invested in the project: “An experience so uniquely refined there can only be one.” That’s right, it echoes the Immortals’ motto from the original “Highlander” film, which implies the gods must kill each other off until there’s only one left.

FOR THREE DAYS, I wandered the vast public spaces and bedazzled hallways of Tilmanland agog, dining at the four restaurants and bars in the hotel proper, and at the two freestanding restaurants, Mastro’s and Willie G’s, that hold pride of place on what employees unselfconsciously refer to as their 10-acre “campus.”

I gawked at the three-story, temperature-controlled, glassed-in champagne towers that climb toward the ceiling on one end of the lobby. I gaped at the perfectly polished Rolls-Royces and Bentleys parked in a two-story showroom smack dab in a hotel corridor. Somebody told me that last week, a Texans’ football player had bought one of the Bentleys. Fertitta’s NBA connection has made the hotel — and its Mastro’s steakhouse — a magnet for professional athletes.

In my 19th floor room, I fiddled with the digital tablet controls that jacked up the air conditioning or whirred open floor-to-ceiling drapes and sheers, revealing the downtown skyline. Downstairs, peering up at the champagne tower, I had felt very small. Here, surveying half of metropolitan Houston and a regal, shifting cloudscape, I felt like the mistress of all I saw. Top of the world, ma.

I pushed a remote control button that caused two 4-foot-wide, back-to-back TV screens to rise slowly, majestically from a dark wood pedestal in the middle of my room. I pinched a tall spray of white orchids on the desk to see if they were real.

They were. So was an identical spray parked on a corner of the marble bathtub, which gleamed pale and gray-veined under a circular chandelier. It sparkled plenty, along with a long, rectangular chandelier in the entryway. In fact, many surfaces twinkled in my room, or gleamed, or glittered, or shone, or otherwise caught the light and bounced it back.

I made a game of counting all the glimmering surfaces, from the studs on chair backs and bed bases, to the metallic beads on sofa pillows, to the shiny glass and silvery barware on the mirrored in-room bar. At 42, I kind of lost count.

It can be hard to wrap your head around the crazy level of detail crammed into this 526-square-foot space. I estimated 18 different fabrics, all told; and 20 wall, floor or furniture coverings.

But then, Fertitta has long been obsessed with detail. The first time I met him, in the spring of 1994, he had recently taken Landry’s public in two hugely successful stock offerings that had put $25 million in his coffers. Yet he was in a swivet about light bulbs.

It was 50 minutes before the grand opening of his 17th Landry’s restaurant, on the Seawall in his hometown of Galveston. I was there to profile him for the Houston Press. Amid furious hammering, Fertitta ordered ladders to be hustled in and every single one of 200 floodlights in the 500-seat dining room to be swapped out with 40-watt bulbs.

When I told that story to Jim Carey, the affable Boston Irishman who is head concierge at The Post Oak, he laughed. “He’s still like that,” said Carey, who busted me coming out of the elevator (part of his job, really) on Day 2. “Tilman’s always thinking about lighting. He can spot a burned-out bulb faster than anyone on staff.”

Fertitta is in the hotel on a near-daily basis when he’s in Houston, said Carey, almost always wearing his uniform. Black T-shirt. Black jeans. Black shoes. He still likes to change things up. The Post Oak’s spa has been delayed until fall because Fertitta moved it to a different floor.

“Did you see that freestanding spiral staircase in the Rolls Royce showroom?” Carey asked me. It’s hard to miss, a seashell of pale creamy stone and glass sidewalls, with a flash of silver trim. Guests were taking wedding portraits and glamour selfies on the swirl of steps, and Fertitta suddenly realized the backdrop of blank wall across the driveway was just…meh.

Two days later, by royal decree, a living quilt of greenery covered the wall, the variegated plants interspersed by columns of colored light that rotate through the spectrum as night gathers. Poof! Sure enough, during the next few days I see two different women posing regally above the six-figure cars, set off by this improbable riot of color.

Like so much here, it’s eminently Instagrammable. Same goes for dinner at Mastro’s, a dark, noisy man-cave where suddenly a high-flying seafood tower appears, streaming ghostly clouds of dry ice as a team of waiters bears it through the dining room, some lifting, others pointing flashlights to highlight the spectacle.

Even a lowly cocktail of three “Colossal Shrimp” gets the dry ice-treatment, which can make you jump if you’re not expecting it. Like much of the food I tried during my one-and-a-half visits to the steakhouse, part of a Phoenix-based chain acquired by Landry’s, it was fine. Not great, but good enough. Although I must say a $683 dinner bill (with tip) for three people nearly gave me heart failure.

Price be damned, Mastro’s seethes with electricity. From 5 p.m. on, the bar is so thronged you can hardly elbow a path through. Lamborghinis and Ferraris swarm on the front drive, while young women tuck away their to-go bags so they can take giddy selfies.

Right across the drive, I was tempted to Instagram the iced seafood display that greets guests at Willie G’s. It’s a baroque Dutch still life, dramatically lit and impossibly lavish, a braggadocious show of wealth. Some of the species so lovingly displayed (Pink porgy? Sculpin?) do not even appear on the surprisingly ambitious menu. Like the slick interior, it’s a far cry from the homely Gulf Coast specialties of the original Willie G’s, where oil and gas guys clinked beer mugs with real estate hustlers back in the go-go 1980s.

But I liked my dinner here, from the well-made cocktails to the careful oyster service. For old times’ sake, I ordered a modern revamp of Oil Field Trash, the famous buttered shellfish sauté; and a fried seafood platter. I rejoiced in an unexpected bottle of affordable Italian white, Sartarelli Tralivio Verdicchio, from a wine list administered by Monica Townsend, whom I remembered from the late Bernadine’s.

Indeed, the wines at The Post Oak are a plus in terms of quality and range, if not in terms of price. The markup is healthy, and the 30,000-bottle collection — some of it housed in an underground bunker, all of it producible on demand anywhere in the hotel complex, including room service — has choices for cats and kings alike.

Or for whales, to use a casino term for big spenders. Sipping an impeccable Last Word cocktail of gin and Chartreuse in H Bar, the dark watering hole just off the lobby, I was amused to see a bottle of $80,000 Chateau Gruaud-Larose Saint Julien from the 1825 vintage on the list. I mean, how else would you toast the purchase of your new Rolls?

Eventually a complex called The Cellar will be completed to house such treasures, and to host wine dinners and special events. The, ahem, details are still coming together. Fertitta and company have gathered some formidable wine talents to preside, including Master Sommelier Keith Goldston and Director of Beverage Travis Hinkle, who worked in that capacity at The Pass and for the pre-collapse Treadsack group.

There is beer, too. Craft beer, to be sure, drawn from the tap wall at the informal Craft F&B, which draws a younger, less spendy crowd than Mastro’s. It combines two Landry’s concepts — Bill’s Bar & Burger and Pizza Oven — under the same roof, which happens to be festooned with about a half-dozen different types of hanging lamps. The burgers are good. The pizzas are not. And the tater tots skewered with bacon (“Wright’s, Mr. Fertitta’s favorite bacon,” a suspendered server said reverently) and doused with an obstreperous barbecue sauce, may be the worst thing I’ve eaten this year.

Presiding over this and all the in-hotel dining spots, plus room service and event catering, is Frenchman Jean-Luc Royere, who comes from a resort-hotel background. Dismal pizza aside, I thought I could detect his influence in the lovely Viennoiserie and cunning pastries next door at Bouchée, a Bouchon-type bakery cafe that plays Piaf and vintage jazz in a bandbox of cream and pastels. The baked goods are made in-house, and every night, before the cafe’s midnight close, I’d buy a beautifully laminated and glazed fresh-peach twist to eat for the next morning’s breakfast.

First, though, I had to grapple with the in-room Nespresso machine. At one point, I had water spitting through the contraption in a dishwater-looking stream; at another, I made a mess because I hadn’t stationed my cup close enough to the downspout.

That was one of only a few kinks during my stay. One day the staff failed to replenish my espresso capsules and creamer. Another, they failed — the horror! — to pick up two orchid blossoms that had dropped from the plant on my desk. The lever in my bathtub didn’t work when I leaned over to drain my bath, and I didn’t feel like stepping back in, so I left the water for staff to empty.

But that wasn’t the funny part. Above the soaking-depth tub hung a TV screen where I could watch whatever I wanted, including movies. Cool, I thought. I’ll soak and relax and see “Annihilation,” the creepy Alex Garland sci-fi thriller. As the movie rolled, I kept wondering why the actors’ faces were hidden by a sort of fluorescent glaze. Maybe it was some artsy lighting effect?

Nope. Finally it drove me so crazy I stood up and wrapped one of the hotel's absurdly large, absurdly fluffy Egyptian cotton bath sheets around me. The minute I did, I could see the image was fine. But my angle, reclining in the tub, had been all wrong.

OTHERWISE, THINGS went swimmingly. I loved having a late-night cocktail from H Bar served at a table by the pool, which shone cobalt-blue and fuchsia from underwater lights, just beyond a glass lobby wall. I especially loved the surreal combination of the waterfall spilling from the hot tub combined with flames leaping from a fire pit, which blazed away in the triple-digit late-June heat. It made no sense — that’s the deal in Wonderland — which is precisely why I loved it.

I mightily enjoyed the people watching, too. An entire extended family trouped in behind a Sikh paterfamilias, he turbaned and sportswear-clad. They took up positions at a table and on one of the big round poolside “daybeds.” I wondered whether the male half of a couple that emerged from a private cabana might be an NFL linebacker. I eavesdropped on a bevy of young women celebrating a friend’s engagement as a big wrapped bouquet lay on their table.

Inside the lobby, as midnight came and went, platoons of pretty young things streamed into H Bar on stilettos and high, tilty wedges, clad in cold shoulders and bandage dresses, voile and linen. The waitresses in their short little black dresses seemed to be everywhere, delivering drinks in the lobby and poolside, as if they had stepped from a 1980s Robert Palmer music video.

Like much of the hotel staff, they were young and alert and warm in demeanor. I noticed a level of hospitality that’s unusual in a luxury hotel venue, even when I crossed paths with a uniformed repairman, hiking his way across one of the unsettling lichen-patterned carpets that line the halls, he’d look me in the eye and say “good afternoon” as if he meant it. If Fertitta is aiming for that elusive five-star hotel rating, this is how you get there.

That service warmth happened everywhere: in the clothing and accessories boutique, 29° North, where I could afford almost nothing; at the desk of the Bloom and Bee restaurant, a flowery, soft-hued retreat for Ladies who Lunch (and a few of the men who love them).

Here I contemplated the tight, short, dozen-rose bouquets that adorned every table, all set beneath a ceiling of floating art-glass blooms. I ran into James Peat working the room, as he has in similar roles at Underbelly, Le Colonial and La Table. “Part of my job,” he told me, “is to recognize the faces in the arena.”

The dining room at Bloom and Bee: Only the bravest men dare intrude.

He kissed old friends, dispensed complimentary glasses of sparkling rosé to his regulars, and confided that while some men (invariably clustered at Bloom and Bee’s counter during my visits) enjoyed all this feminine pulchritude, others seemed spooked by what one called “cackling hens.”

This cackling hen ended up liking Bloom and Bee best of all The Post Oak’s dining options. The food was fresh and light. The flavors sparkled. Even the house-muddled rosé sangria — “We sold 1,000 glasses last month,” a bartender told me as she batched the afternoon’s supply — was better than I had hoped. At the end, when I was presented with two tiny cornets of champagne sorbet, topped with baby streamers of gold leaf, I actually laughed with pleasure. It was the waffle-cone equivalent of a shih-tzu.

Speaking of which: You can bring your dog of up to 100 pounds along to The Post Oak, as long as you sign a waiver and pop for the $125 cleaning fee. There are doggo amenities to go along, including “a pet-friendly in-room dining menu featuring chef-crafted Roasted Chopped Filet Mignon.” In other words, very fancy hamburger.

It’s that mix of luxe and democracy that makes The Post Oak such an unusual scene, a palace wrought by a scrappy everyman’s billionaire who fascinates Houstonians high, low and in-between.

Alison Cook is the Chronicle's James Beard Award-winning restaurant critic. Follow her on Twitter, and keep up with Houston's latest dining and drinking news and reviews by subscribing to our free Flavor newsletter.

Alison Cook - a two-time James Beard Award winner for restaurant criticism and an M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing award recipient - has been reviewing restaurants and surveying the dining scene for the Houston Chronicle since 2002.

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