Why you should experience The Ivy Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
The Ivy Hotel is an intimate vertical retreat where Streeterville's dense architectural fabric, independent hotel character and proximity to Chicago's cultural institutions converge inside a former office building transformed at the beginning of the 2010s.
Set along East Ontario Street near North St. Clair Street and just steps from The Arts Club of Chicago, the hotel occupies a narrow tower built in 1973 for offices before its conversion introduced an unusually small hotel footprint into a district dominated by much larger residential, medical and hospitality buildings. The property emerged in 2012 with 63 rooms distributed vertically through the tower, making spatial generosity rather than room count central to its character at an address where the majority of accommodations were conceived as suites. The conversion culminated above the original commercial structure with Sky Terrace, a 3,100-square-foot rooftop conceived as an elevated counterpart to the residential scale below and positioned above the surrounding Ontario Street streetscape. The result is a hotel whose character comes from inversion: a compact former workplace became a low-key residential retreat while one of Downtown's most intensively developed districts continued rising around it.
What you should know about The Ivy Hotel.
The Ivy Hotel is best known for pursuing the economics of a 63-key hotel through unusually large accommodations, with the vast majority measuring 675 square feet and producing a room-to-building relationship markedly different from the compact layouts common to dense downtown properties. That residential concept has persisted through the hotel's evolution, with its present inventory still totaling 63 rooms and suites while the Ivy Elevated Collection concentrates another expression of the concept on the 14th floor. The property changed hands in January 2019, beginning a second ownership chapter seven years after the office conversion and eventually becoming the subject of a $12 million refinancing arranged by RobertDouglas for 233 E Ontario Hotel Propco. The combination of 1973 commercial origins, 2012 conversion, 2019 acquisition and subsequent financing gives the hotel a concise development history in which a relatively small number of oversized accommodations has remained the central economic and spatial concept.
The hotel's character also developed around an independent cultural style rather than affiliation with a global hospitality flag, with fine art by Chicago artists incorporated into interiors from its opening era and the building remaining associated with a distinctly local boutique model. Divine Lounge established the social component at street level, while the rooftop created an opposing perspective sixteen floors above Ontario Street, producing a vertical sequence from enclosed residential interiors to open views across Streeterville. The address places that sequence within the same Ontario Street corridor as an unusually important chapter of Chicago modernism: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created The Arts Club of Chicago's celebrated steel-and-travertine staircase for its former 109 East Ontario Street rooms between 1948 and 1951, and John Vinci preserved the stair when the club moved into its current building nearby. The Ivy Hotel consequently occupies a modest but revealing position within Streeterville, where an independent 2012 hotel conversion shares a street with a cultural institution whose successive homes preserve the architectural lineage of Mies and Vinci.
How to fold The Ivy Hotel into your trip.
The Ivy Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the patrons, architects and institutions that made the blocks surrounding East Ontario Street one of Chicago's richest concentrations of modern artistic culture.
Begin at The Arts Club of Chicago, founded in 1916 to advance contemporary art before Rue Winterbotham Shaw commissioned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design its 109 East Ontario Street interiors, which opened in 1951 with Jean Dubuffet's Anti-Cultural Positions lecture and subsequently hosted figures including Marc Chagall and Louise Nevelson; when those rooms were demolished in 1995, John Vinci preserved Mies's steel-and-travertine staircase as the nucleus of the club's purpose-built 1997 home. Continue to Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, founded in 1967 as an institution devoted to experimental contemporary practice before commissioning Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues for his first American project, a $45 million building completed in 1996 on the former Illinois National Guard Chicago Avenue Armory site and opened with a 24-hour preview that drew more than 25,000 people. Conclude at Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where banker and liquor executive Samuel Mayo Nickerson completed his lavish residence in 1883, creating a house so materially ambitious that contemporary accounts singled out its vast proportions, art gallery, conservatory and carriage court while later preservation allowed the interiors to become the setting for Richard H. Driehaus's collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorative arts. The progression moves from Mies and Shaw's postwar experimentation through Kleihues's late-twentieth-century museum architecture into Nickerson and Driehaus's culture of collecting, revealing the unusually concentrated artistic history surrounding The Ivy Hotel beyond East Ontario Street.
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