Still-shaggy Paul Fegen returns to executive suite business arena. (founder of office suite industry)

Paul Fegen, founder of the office suite industry and a man who once boasted more hair and more tenants than anyone else in Los Angeles real estate, is back in business.

Fegen -- who was known as much for his purple Excalibur car and extravagant parties as for his phenomenal real estate success -- has created a new company which filled nearly two floors of Century City office space following an eight-year hiatus shepherding his former firm through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

He explains that he is operating quietly because of a non-compete clause with Barrister Executive Suites Inc., the company that bought his former holdings.

Executive suite operators lease large blocks of office space, segment that space into individual offices, sublease the offices to occupants, and provide for-fee business services to those occupants. After Fegen pioneered the concept in the mid-1960s, it gained widespread popularity.

In something of an ironic twist, Fegen is operating under his own name as Paul F. Fegen Executive/Law Suites. It's ironic because in his heyday, although Fegen's suites were so widespread that the term "Fegen Suite" was used generically to refer to any executive suite, he never did business under his own name. When he held leases on some 7 million square feet of office space in 25 states, he did it as founder of Attorneys Office Management Inc.

Fegen remained chairman of Attorneys Office Management Inc. throughout its Chapter 11 reorganization, finally selling out to Barrister in early 1990. By then, however, that 7 million square feet had dwindled to about 550,000.

Fegen blames his fall on his firm's unbridled growth, the 1982 recession and a Texas oil bust that created such big losses he couldn't recover. He had sizable executive suite operations in Houston and other Texas oil cities at that time.

But now Fegen speaks optimistically of the executive suites market and office leasing in general, figuring there must be hope if he can fill two floors at the bottom of a battered real estate market.

"I opened my first suite and filled it in about six months. The second suite is about 80 percent occupied after four or five months, which is very good in this bad economy," Fegen said. (A suite, in executive suite jargon, is a floor or part of a floor operated as executive suites.)

Fegen's two floors of executive suites house a total of about 80 occupants in 30,000 square feet of space. The suites are in Century City on the 28th floor of 1999 Avenue of the Stars and the seventh floor of 1875 Century Park East. Each of those two floors contains 15,000 square feet of space.

Despite Fegen's return to the executive suite business, chances that the business will regain its former glory remain questionable. Fegen said he will grow more slowly this time around. And the executive director of the industry's national trade association said the changing nature of executive suites makes them less of a real estate venture and more of a business-service industry than they used to be.

"The industry may not be growing so much in terms of square footage, but it is growing in terms of revenues. It's not really the real estate industry, although it is closely tied to it," said Jane Booras, executive director of Dallas-based Executive Suite Network.

Booras said nearly 50 percent of a suite operator's revenue now comes from auxiliary services, such as fax machines, photocopiers and telephone services.

Fegen opened the first suite under his new company in December 1991 at 1999 Avenue of the Stars in Century City and later added a second suite at 1875 Century Park East.

His tenants are still primarily lawyers, but Fegen has opted for trendier brass and marble instead of the dark wood-paneled suites of the 1960s.

In many ways he is still the same Paul Fegen, with long hair and a beard that in his heyday earned him notoriety in the normally staid legal and business worlds. He still drives a purple Excalibur car equipped with a horn that plays 79 tunes and a loudspeaker for hailing friends.

As for the legendary parties he once hosted, like the weekly gatherings at his Hollywood Hills home or the soiree he once threw at the Century Plaza Hotel to celebrate one of his rare haircuts, Fegen had this to say in early January:

"I haven't had a party since Dec. 31, 1992." The place was his home in Hollywood hills and the guest list numbered 1,000, he said.