Why you should experience Freehand Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.
Freehand Chicago is a bohemian hotel where River North's creative restlessness, architectural inheritance, independent hospitality culture and instinct for turning unconventional spaces into social worlds converge inside a 1927 former hotel.
Set along East Ohio Street near North State Street and just steps from Tree Studios, the property occupies the former Tokyo Hotel, whose surviving Jazz Age structure gave Sydell Group a nearly century-old structure for the second location of its Freehand concept. New York design studio Roman and Williams, founded by Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, transformed the building through layered woodwork, textiles, vintage-inspired furnishings and communal interiors while retaining physical traces of its predecessor, including the old Tokyo Hotel sign beneath the Freehand identity. The resulting property opened in 2015 after Freehand Miami established Sydell Group's hybrid hotel-hostel model in Florida, bringing private accommodations and shared bunk rooms together within a design-led urban format. The result is a hotel where the Tokyo Hotel, Sydell Group, Standefer, Alesch and Roman and Williams connect River North's older lodging history with a younger generation of American independent hospitality.
What you should know about Freehand Chicago.
Freehand Chicago is best known for opening in 2015 as the second Freehand outpost, with Sydell Group extending a hospitality concept conceived by founder Andrew Zobler around the sociability of European hostels while pairing it with professionally authored interiors, food, cocktails and art. The Chicago property contains more than 200 accommodations spanning conventional guestrooms, shared formats and penthouse suites, while custom-commissioned works by Bard College students and alumni became part of the original room design. Freehand's cultural program grew from Sydell Group's relationship with Bard College, connecting emerging artists with a hospitality brand whose later New York property developed the collaboration into a formal artist-in-residence program. Zobler's concept ultimately expanded from Miami and Chicago into Los Angeles and New York, establishing Freehand as an American experiment in combining hostel economics, boutique-hotel design and locally oriented cultural programming within major-city properties.
Bar Lab founders Gabriel Orta and Elad Zvi extend that creative authorship through Broken Shaker, the cocktail concept born at Freehand Miami before reaching Chicago in 2015 with chef Jonathan Meyer and opening bar manager Freddie Sarkis, previously beverage director at Celeste, leading its local food and drink programs. Broken Shaker's reputation arrived with substantial industry credibility from its Miami predecessor, including recognition from Tales of the Cocktail, while the Chicago bar developed drinks around house-made elixirs, syrups, infusions, garden herbs, spices and produce. Nicaraguan coffee specialist César Vega introduced Café Integral alongside Broken Shaker, bringing the New York-born café to Chicago with coffees sourced exclusively from Nicaragua and extending Vega's family connection to the country's coffee culture into Freehand's daytime identity. Together, Gabriel Orta, Elad Zvi, Jonathan Meyer, Freddie Sarkis and César Vega turned Freehand Chicago's food-and-drink program into an extension of Zobler's social-hospitality thesis, connecting Miami cocktail culture, Chicago bartending and Nicaraguan coffee within the same Ohio Street property.
How to fold Freehand Chicago into your trip.
Freehand Chicago works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing artist communities, private collecting and experimental cultural institutions through River North.
Begin at Tree Studios, where Judge Lambert Tree and his wife Anna Field Tree commissioned Parfitt Brothers to create affordable studios for artists beginning in 1894, establishing a creative enclave whose residents and occupants included sculptor Albin Polasek and painters John Storrs and John Warner Norton as the complex expanded across the surrounding block. Continue to The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where banker Samuel Mayo Nickerson commissioned Burling & Whitehouse for the 24,000-square-foot residence completed in 1883 for $450,000, with R. W. Bates & Co., William August Fiedler and George A. Schastey & Co. contributing to interiors whose marble, carved wood, mosaics and stained glass produced the house's Marble Palace sobriquet. Conclude at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, founded in 1967 under Jan van der Marck before Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues received his first American commission for its present building, which opened in 1996 after a $45 million construction program and welcomed more than 25,000 people during a 24-hour preview. The progression moves from the Trees' purpose-built community for working artists through Nickerson's Gilded Age patronage into van der Marck and Kleihues's institution for experimental art, placing Freehand Chicago within a broader River North history of spaces created around creative production.
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