Why you should experience Arlo Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.
Arlo Chicago is an artful heritage hotel where Chicago Loop's architectural ambition, Michigan Avenue energy, creative culture and century-long instinct for remaking the vertical city converge within the former Atlantic Bank Building.
Set along North Michigan Avenue near East Randolph Street and just steps from Millennium Park, the hotel occupies a structure originally designed by Benjamin Marshall, the Chicago architect whose portfolio also included Blackstone Hotel, Drake Hotel and Edgewater Beach Hotel. Oxford Capital Group acquired the long-vacant building and directed a $75 million redevelopment with Hirsch MPG, W.E. O'Neil Construction and structural engineer TGRWA, expanding the existing 13-story structure upward with five additional steel-framed stories to create an 100,000-square-foot, 18-story hotel. The engineering program strengthened the original clay-tile and steel framing while repairing deteriorated slabs and structural members, earning honors including a 2019 Chicago Building Congress Merit Award and 2019 Structural Engineers Association of Illinois Excellence in Structural Engineering award. The result is a hotel where Benjamin Marshall, Oxford Capital Group, Hirsch MPG, W.E. O'Neil and TGRWA connect Chicago Loop's early skyscraper culture with an unusually ambitious twenty-first-century vertical reconstruction.
What you should know about Arlo Chicago.
Arlo Chicago is best known for arriving on April 11, 2023 when Arlo Hotels assumed the former Hotel Julian, bringing the lifestyle brand to Chicago with 218 guestrooms and establishing its first Midwest property on Michigan Avenue. The transition expanded a brand created by Quadrum Global, whose Arlo portfolio began in New York with Arlo Hudson Square and Arlo NoMad before extending into Miami and additional American markets. The Gettys Group authored the Chicago property's interiors during its Hotel Julian chapter, developing a contemporary visual language around rich materials, graphic forms and references to the city while the property operated as an independent lifestyle hotel. Arlo's 2023 arrival connected Quadrum Global's expanding hospitality platform with an existing Chicago design project whose architectural and interior identities had already been developed independently before the new flag appeared.
About Last Knife develops another strand of the property's authorship through a restaurant conceived around the steakhouse as a piece of Chicago cultural mythology, pairing the abbreviated ALK character with a deliberately contemporary interpretation of the genre. Oxford Hotels & Resorts continues to identify ALK as the property's gastropub, preserving a restaurant concept inherited from the Hotel Julian period through the transition to Arlo. Arlo subsequently embedded a philanthropic dimension into the Chicago operation through Deborah's Place, directing $0.50 from each occupied night to the organization supporting women experiencing homelessness through housing and services in Chicago. Together, About Last Knife, Oxford Hotels & Resorts and Deborah's Place extend the property's contemporary character through a locally coded restaurant concept, continuing Chicago hotel stewardship and a direct relationship with a Chicago social-service institution.
How to fold Arlo Chicago into your trip.
Arlo Chicago works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Chicago's relationship with architecture, public art and cultural patronage around the Chicago Loop.
Begin at Chicago Cultural Center, where Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge designed the former Chicago Public Library completed in 1897, culminating in Preston Bradley Hall beneath an immense Tiffany glass dome assembled from 30,000 pieces of Favrile glass. Continue to Millennium Park, where the 24.5-acre project opened in 2004 after converting former railroad land and parking infrastructure into an ensemble bringing Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion together with Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate and Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain. Conclude at Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 and housed since the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in the Michigan Avenue building designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge before Renzo Piano's 264,000-square-foot Modern Wing expanded the institution in 2009. The progression moves from Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge's nineteenth-century cultural architecture through Gehry, Kapoor and Plensa's twenty-first-century public realm into Piano's expansion of one of America's major art museums, placing Arlo Chicago within the extraordinary concentration of design culture surrounding its Michigan Avenue address.
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