narasin

Mr. Narasin questions what is behind this rush to judge.

"We're just this normal family with kids looking for a place to live," Mr. Narasin said.

Mr. Narasin, 35, is the president and chief executive of fashionmall.com, a Web site that sells designer clothing.

After leaving two messages without getting a call back, Mr. Narasin chalked the letter up as a bad joke.

This was not the first time Mr. Narasin's company was the target of a supposed takeover.

Mr. Narasin said he enjoyed running his Internet company and had no interest in selling it yet - at least until the next suitor comes calling.

Skeptical but curious, Mr. Narasin said he called Mr. Savage.

Fashionmall, which Mr. Narasin founded six years ago, has remained a niche player for most of the Internet craze.

And Mr. Narasin and each of the directors have signed agreements not to sell their Fashionmall stock without board approval.

In the last six months, they have looked at about 60 prewar co-op buildings in Carnegie Hill, Mrs. Narasin's first choice.

For people like Ben Narasin and his family, the liquid-cash problem is particularly frustrating; the family's wealth is tied up in restricted stock in his Internet company.

Mr. Narasin, his wife, Alexandra, and their two young children are exactly the kind of young family any co-op might be searching for: attractive, amiable and rich.

"All of our stuff is in storage," said Mrs. Narasin, 31, the alumnae director at the Birch Wathen Lenox School, a private school on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Narasin speculates that Fashionmall had acquired such peculiar interest because it had stashed away at least $35 million in cash - more than the company's entire market value at the time of Narax's offer.

In a news release, Mr. Narasin said that his only communication with Narax before the company's bid announcement was the fax, which said, "This communication describes a nonbinding proposal and does not constitute a binding offer."

In its most notable achievement since then, Mr. Narasin bought the remnants of the British online fashion retailer, Boo.com, after it filed for bankruptcy after burning through $185 million in 18 months in one of the Internet's first and largest failures.

Sitting in his cramped cubicle in his office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, Benjamin Narasin, chairman and chief executive of Fashionmall, a Web site that sells designer clothing, read a faxed letter sent on Dec. 18 by a Beverly Hills company called Narax.

Alexandra Sevier Black, the director of public relations for Kathryn Dianos Inc., a designer of women's clothing in New York, was married yesterday to Benjamin H. Narasin, the president and chief executive of the Boston Preparatory Company, a men's sportswear manufacturer in New York.