Ian Schrager, the developer credited with inventing the boutique-hotel concept, considered buying Manhattan’s landmark Hotel Chelsea and decided against an offer after viewing the 127-year-old property last month.

“It’s a sexy asset with an incredibly sexy history and we felt obliged to take a look at it,” Schrager, the chairman and chief executive officer of Ian Schrager Co., said in a telephone interview Monday. “We took a pass.”

The owners of the Hotel Chelsea, a rock and roll and literary landmark whose denizens included singer Patti Smith and playwright Arthur Miller, put the property up for sale in October for the first time in more than 65 years. They are asking about $90 million for the 12-story building, according to a person with knowledge of the marketing. The person asked not to be named because the proposed terms are private.

Doug Harmon, senior managing director of Eastdil Secured LLC, the firm marketing the Chelsea to buyers, declined in an e- mail to comment on the price.

Schrager and his business partner, the late Steve Rubell, started the boutique hotel trend in 1984 with the opening of the Morgans Hotel in New York. Schrager also opened the Delano Hotel in Miami; the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, California; and the Hudson Hotel in New York, all currently operated by New York-based Morgans Hotel Group Co. Schrager left Morgans Hotel Group in 2005 to start Ian Schrager Co.

Schrager, 64, said he got “half a dozen” phone calls from investors seeking to partner with him to acquire the property, which includes 125 hotel rooms and 101 apartments with long-term tenants. The hotel carries almost no debt.

“We were a motivated buyer and we would have loved to have gotten it,” Schrager said. “Maybe there are others who are seeing things we didn’t see.”

He estimated that the hotel could command rates of as much as $600 a night. The average rate for a junior suite on Dec. 10 is $349, according to bookings website hotels.com

The Hotel Chelsea, where Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller lived as a married couple and Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe also shared a room, is being marketed not just for its history but also for its yield-generating promise.

In the residential units, property income is derived from rents set decades ago, and an occasional oil painting is offered when the lease comes due.

“Just a few months ago we had a young lady who biked from Canada — literally on a bicycle — and showed up in the lobby, stayed there for a couple for days and kept insisting I give her a room,” Arnold Tamasar, the property’s general manager, said in an October interview. “I negotiated with her and we did a barter. She gave us a beautiful painting and she stayed for about a month.”

Schrager said he would have kept the hotel “basically the same” had he acquired it.

“It would still feel very Bohemian,” he said. “If you put a shine on it, you would have ruined it.”