Why you should experience Hotel Felix in Chicago, Illinois.
Hotel Felix is a resourceful boutique hotel where River North's reinvention, architectural pragmatism, environmental consciousness and talent for giving old Chicago buildings unexpected new lives converge within a 1926 former rooming hotel.
Set along West Huron Street near North Clark Street and just steps from Holy Name Cathedral, the property began as Hotel Wacker, a 12-story building designed by Chicago architecture firm Levy & Klein in 1926 and operated for decades as a single-room-occupancy hotel. The building closed for redevelopment in 2007 before Oxford OBG Hospitality Investment Partners, led by Oxford Capital Group with Bricton Group and Gettys, undertook a conversion exceeding $50 million that preserved the original structure while replacing the interior program. Cubellis served as project architect, Pepper Construction led construction and Gettys developed the interiors, with work running from September 2007 through March 2009 before the 225-room Hotel Felix opened during Earth Month. The result is a hotel where Levy & Klein's Jazz Age shell, Oxford's redevelopment strategy and Gettys' contemporary interiors compress more than eight decades of changing River North hospitality into one compact Huron Street address.
What you should know about Hotel Felix.
Hotel Felix is best known for becoming Chicago's first hotel to earn LEED Silver certification, making environmental design the defining concept of a 2009 opening whose name derives from the Latin word felix, meaning happy. The U.S. Green Building Council certification followed an unusually comprehensive material strategy incorporating reclaimed products, recycled carpeting, low-emitting paints, renewable materials and preservation of the existing building structure, while southern exposure and an enhanced energy-management system reduced demands associated with heating and electricity. The redevelopment became a Downtown Redevelopment of the Year finalist at the Chicago Commercial Real Estate Awards and a Chicago Innovation Awards nominee, giving Oxford Capital Group's experiment recognition beyond the hospitality industry. The hotel subsequently turned that environmental thesis into an art program, commissioning Minneapolis artist Allen Christian to create the seven-foot Loren the Doorman from recycled pipes, an umbrella stand, a drill bit and a milk-bucket head for Earth Day 2010 before Madeline followed in 2011 and Scrappy in 2012, forming a three-work family of sculptures entirely from found and reclaimed materials.
Elate established a culinary counterpart to the hotel's opening character in 2009 under proprietor Anthony Fiore and chef Randal Jacobs, formerly executive chef at DeLaCosta, whose menu included hibachi chicken wings inspired by a Beijing street encounter and finished with lemongrass, grilled lime and house-made sriracha barbecue sauce. Stephan and Nicole Outrequin Quaisser's LM Restaurant Group replaced Elate with LM Bistro in 2012, then partnered with Bistronomic chef Martial Noguier to introduce Troquet River North in January 2014, with Paris transplant Benoît Fliou directing the kitchen. LM Restaurant Group later partnered with Edgewater's Taketei Sushi for a second location inside Hotel Felix, while Tim Coonan's Big Shoulders Coffee added another Chicago-founded operator to the property after Coonan built his roasting company following a career cooking in Chicago, France and New York and teaching at Washburne Culinary Institute and French Pastry School. Fiore, Jacobs, the Outrequin Quaissers, Noguier, Fliou and Coonan collectively turned Hotel Felix's ground floor into a succession of locally authored restaurant concepts, extending the independent Chicago character established by the property's original redevelopment.
How to fold Hotel Felix into your trip.
Hotel Felix works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing ecclesiastical rebuilding, Gilded Age collecting and scholarly institution-building through River North and the adjoining Gold Coast.
Begin at Holy Name Cathedral, where Patrick Charles Keely received the commission in 1874 after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed both Cathedral of St. Mary and Church of the Holy Name, completing the Gothic Revival cathedral in 1875 within a career encompassing hundreds of churches; Albert J. Friscia later designed the bronze-and-glass Tree of Life, Ivo Demetz sculpted the Resurrection Crucifix and 23,000 individually installed pieces of wood now articulate the ceiling. Continue to Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where First National Bank of Chicago founder 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. producing interiors whose material ambition earned the house its Marble Palace sobriquet. Conclude at Newberry Library, founded on July 1, 1887 through Walter Loomis Newberry's $2.2 million bequest, where first librarian William Frederick Poole acquired 25,000 books within eighteen months before his fierce architectural disagreement with Henry Ives Cobb helped shape the permanent Romanesque building opened opposite Washington Square Park in 1893. The progression moves from Keely's post-Fire cathedral through Nickerson's private patronage into Newberry, Poole and Cobb's experiment in scholarly architecture, revealing the nineteenth-century cultural foundations surrounding Hotel Felix's River North address.
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