Why you should experience Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.
Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago is a skyline-minded hotel where Streeterville's vertical ambition, international character, architectural confidence and enduring fascination with experiencing Chicago from above converge within a purpose-built tower conceived for RIU's American expansion.
Set along East Ontario Street near North St. Clair Street and just steps from The Shops at North Bridge, the property rises from a site that remained vacant for more than a decade before The Prime Group advanced a new hotel development for Spanish hospitality company RIU Hotels & Resorts. Lucien Lagrange Studio designed the 28-story tower, while W.E. O'Neil served as general contractor and The Prime Group managed land acquisition, entitlements and construction as RIU's local development partner. Foundation caisson permits arrived in July 2022, full building and tower-crane permits followed that October, and construction carried the project to topping out during 2023 before completion the following year. The result is a hotel where Lucien Lagrange Studio, W.E. O'Neil, The Prime Group and RIU turned a long-empty Ontario Street parcel into a new vertical presence within one of Chicago's densest hospitality districts.
What you should know about Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago.
Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago is best known for opening on July 18, 2024 with 390 rooms as RIU Hotels & Resorts' fifth urban property in the United States and eleventh RIU Plaza worldwide, extending a city-hotel strategy first introduced fourteen years earlier in Panama City. RIU had spent more than five decades concentrating on vacation properties before launching Riu Plaza Panama in September 2010 with 644 rooms, creating an urban division subsequently expanded through Guadalajara, New York, Miami Beach, Berlin, Madrid, London, Toronto and other major cities. The company itself began in November 1953 when Juan Riu Masmitjá, María Bertrán Espigulé and their son Luis Riu Bertrán acquired the 80-bed Hotel San Francisco in Playa de Palma, Mallorca, establishing the family enterprise that eventually grew to almost 100 hotels across 21 countries. Luis Riu Güell, born in Palma in 1960 and a University of Barcelona business graduate, became third-generation leadership in 1998, directed the company's internationalization and urban diversification, and has served as sole CEO since July 2024 after previously sharing leadership with his sister Carmen Riu.
The Rooftop develops the Chicago property's most distinctive expression of that urban strategy through a 27th-floor terrace whose glass balcony projects 88 metres above the street, converting the city's architecture into the central performance of the hotel's social identity. RIU unveiled the terrace in September 2024 after designing the elevated space around panoramic skyline exposure, with the projecting glass platform becoming a structural punctuation mark at the top of the new tower. Chicago also strengthened a United States portfolio that had already placed RIU Plaza properties in New York and Miami, while the company's wider American expansion traces back to Luis Riu's assumption of international-development responsibilities and the opening of Riu Taino in Punta Cana in November 1991. The progression from the Riu family's 80-bed Mallorcan beginning through the 2010 creation of an urban division and the 88-metre Chicago glass balcony gives Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago a coherent corporate character built around one family company's evolution from Mediterranean vacation hospitality into metropolitan high-rise hotels.
How to fold Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago into your trip.
Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing private collecting, modern art and ecclesiastical architecture through the blocks where Streeterville meets Chicago's Gold Coast.
Begin at Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where banker Samuel Mayo Nickerson commissioned Burling & Whitehouse for a 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 lavish marble, carved wood, mosaics and stained glass earned the house its Marble Palace sobriquet. Continue to Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, founded in 1967 under founding director Jan van der Marck before Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues won the commission for the institution's present building, his first American project, which opened in 1996 after a $45 million construction program and welcomed more than 25,000 people during a 24-hour preview. Conclude at Fourth Presbyterian Church, where Ralph Adams Cram designed the sanctuary, Howard Van Doren Shaw shaped the adjoining parish buildings, Charles Connick contributed stained glass and Frederic C. Bartlett directed interior decoration for a complex dedicated in May 1914 as North Michigan Avenue approached its defining twentieth-century expansion. The progression moves from Nickerson's Gilded Age patronage through van der Marck and Kleihues's institution for contemporary art into Cram, Shaw, Connick and Bartlett's collaborative architecture, revealing the unusually dense concentration of cultural authorship surrounding Hotel Riu Plaza Chicago in Streeterville.
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