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Sports arenas don’t normally have wine cellars. Or private lounges where members keep their cigars in humidors. Or restaurants where the sous-chefs fuss over which hard-crusted breads to serve with hummus.

But the Staples Center, under construction downtown, is not shaping up as a normal arena.

From its $300,000 luxury boxes to waiters who hustle down aisles with radio-equipped order pads, this will be an unusually extravagant sports venue. Its expensive amenities might not sell in other cities, but marketing experts say the arena’s designers have made a shrewd decision in playing to an upscale crowd.

“This is not Detroit or Chicago,” said Rick Burton, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. “They know their clientele is high-profile, seen-it-all, done-it-all.

“Jack Nicholson at courtside and Dyan Cannon in the stands. . . . You’d better do it right in Los Angeles.”

The Staples Center opens in October as home to the Lakers, Clippers and Kings, a replacement for the aging Great Western Forum and Sports Arena. General Manager Bobby Goldwater says his $375-million building was designed to serve well-to-do customers who “have come to expect more.”

The trend can be seen in arenas across the nation. The Philips Arena in Atlanta will have four tiers of 90 suites when it opens in the fall. The Rose Garden in Portland, Ore., and MCI Center in Washington have tony restaurants. But the Southern California market, with its wealth and taste for glitz, has given the Staples Center room to, as Burton says, “push the envelope a little farther.”

Hence the Premier Club, a stadium bar with no banners hanging from the ceiling, no televisions blaring highlights. Its clients aren’t likely to arrive with their faces painted in team colors.

Membership is limited to 200 and the $10,500-a-year dues are roughly 23 times the cost of the cheapest Clipper season ticket. Guests can sit beside the fireplace or savor a cigar on the terrace while they sip wine from the private cellar. Waiters will serve a different kind of pregame snack.

“Oysters on the half-shell and single-malt scotches,” said Michael Thom, the arena’s executive chef.

Goldwater muses that when he started as a staff member at Madison Square Garden in 1974, arenas did not have executive chefs. Nor did they serve sushi or smoked salmon dip.

Those are only the starters at his new restaurant, the Arena Club, a 500-seat room with tiers of tables overlooking the court. Reservations are accepted only from suite holders and fans in the pricey Premier seats.

Diners will be greeted by “the kind of maitre d’ who says, ‘Hello, Mr. Smith, it’s good to see you again,’ ” Thom explained. The prices will befit the city’s top restaurants.

“You can’t do this just anywhere,” Goldwater said. “I can’t think of another city, other than New York, where you could have an arena like this.”

Even at Madison Square Garden, Goldwater’s attempt to establish a private club met with tepid response.

At the Staples Center, 125 fans inquired about Premier Club membership before the first mailer was sent. All but 14 of the 160 suites have been leased at prices ranging from $197,000 to $307,500 a year. The new $213-million arena in Atlanta, by comparison, charges a maximum of $225,000.

As for the Premier seats, about 75% of 2,500 have sold. Starting at $12,995, they include tickets to all three teams, a private entrance and, of course, those high-tech waiters who can beam orders directly to the snack bar where runners wait to deliver hot dogs and beer within five minutes.

“High-end stuff,” said Mark S. Rosentraub, author of “Major League Losers,” a study of sports venues. “You have opportunities in the L.A. market that are only possible in two or there other markets.”

Those opportunities might well be rooted in Southern California history. The region’s culture was forged, beginning in the 1920s, by men who earned quick fortunes in movies, real estate and the savings-and-loan industry. They established a pattern of conspicuous consumption.

“Many of them were rags-to-riches stories,” said Gloria Lothrop, who holds the W.P. Whitsett chair of California history at Cal State Northridge.

“Think of the expensive automobiles and the decorators they hired to re-create their palazzos in Bel-Air,” Lothrop said. “There has always been the inclination to establish one’s credentials through the display of wealth.”

At the Staples Center, that could mean valet parking and hiring a personal chef to prepare dinner in your suite during the game. It could mean spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, at which point the fun becomes a little more serious.

“As the suites and restaurants have evolved, there is a different type of fan,” Goldwater said. “There is more corporate entertaining. They’re excited about the game, but they’re also looking to do business.”

Or, in the grandest of Hollywood traditions, they are looking to be seen.

“If I were selling down there, that’s the strategy I would use,” Burton said. “You’re not a somebody until you’ve got your suite at the Staples Center.”

This may seem all-too-fitting for modern professional sport, which can resemble a morass of commercialization and outrageous salaries. But one expert says the arena as a monument to wealth is nothing new.

“You can go back to the Colosseum in Rome and you’ll find this sort of separation of the classes by seating arrangements and amenities,” said Robert Baade, an economics professor at Lake Forest (Ill.) College. “History has a way of repeating itself.”

So where does that leave the common fan who, as Goldwater says, “provides the emotion and heat” in the final minutes of the game?

The Lakers will charge many season-ticket holders more, in some cases nearly double from last season. The Clippers have raised some prices. The Kings have not.

But all three teams will ask fans in the cheapest seats to watch the game from farther away, perched above three stories of suites at the arena’s mid-level. The Kings sent a brochure to ticket-holders pledging to deal “with those ‘distance to the ice’ issues that will arise due to the Staples Center being larger than the Forum.”

The new arena has 2 1/2 times the square footage, however, so pleasing everyone could be tricky.

“Who wants to walk to the upper deck and sit in a nosebleed seat for that kind of money?” Burton, of Oregon, asked. “The common fan is being priced out of the arena.”

The situation is not lost on Ed Roski Jr., one of the arena’s owners and a developer whose net worth was recently estimated at $800 million. He says that, aside from professional sports, there will be plenty of affordable events in the building.

“There will be enough things happening that everybody will be able to participate, whether it’s the circus or the rodeo or the tractor pull,” he said.

But Roski knows that, no matter the event, the common fan probably can’t afford seats where waiters come to take food orders. The common fan might never see the inside of a suite or the arena’s exclusive club.

“Everybody’s concerned about it,” Roski said. “But we’re Hollywood and we have to be a little more glitzy. . . . It’s the nature of the business.”

How Suite It Is

* Number of suites: 160.

* Size range: 250 to 425 square feet.

* Price range: $197,000 to $307,500 for first year ($50,000 security deposit due Oct. 1, 1999).

* Leasing terms: 5 years (7% annual increase per year), 7 years (5% annual increase) and 10 years (3% annual increase).

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Suite Staples

* Number of suites: 160.

* Number of suites leased so far: 146.

* Size range: 250 to 425 square feet.

* Standard equipment: two refrigerators, wide-screen and dual-screen digital television monitors, direct telephone line and fax modem.

* Price range: $197,000 to $307,500 for first year ($50,000 security deposit due Oct. 1, 1999).

* Note: Most suite holders are corporations, law firms and film studios. Tom Hanks is an individual owner, as is Pat Sajak and Rob Blake, whose suite is part of his contract with the Kings.