Why you should experience L7 Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.
L7 Chicago is a cosmopolitan hotel where the Chicago Loop's millinery history, early skyscraper commerce, Korean cultural authorship and contemporary hospitality converge inside a century-old Wabash Avenue tower.
Set along North Wabash Avenue near East Wacker Place and just steps from the Chicago Riverwalk, the hotel occupies a 14-story building erected in 1912 for D.B. Fisk & Co., the wholesale millinery business that had spent four decades near Washington and Wabash before the Marshall Field estate commissioned its new headquarters. Architect George L. Harvey designed the 140-foot-wide Wabash frontage with buff brick and gray terra cotta for a company then described as the nation's largest wholesale millinery concern, while D.B. Fisk occupied the entire building until 1932 before later hospitality chapters included Oxford House and Kimpton Hotel Monaco Chicago. Lotte Hotels & Resorts acquired the 191-room Monaco from Xenia Hotels & Resorts for $36 million in January 2022 through a joint investment with Korea Overseas Infrastructure & Urban Development Corporation, selecting the building to introduce its lifestyle brand to North America. The result is a hotel where D.B. Fisk, George L. Harvey, the Marshall Field estate and Lotte connect Chicago's early-twentieth-century fashion economy with South Korea's twenty-first-century hospitality expansion through the same Wabash Avenue address.
What you should know about L7 Chicago.
L7 Chicago is best known for opening in June 2024 as the first North American property from Lotte Hotels & Resorts' L7 brand, bringing a concept launched in Seoul's Myeongdong district in 2016 into a 191-room Chicago hotel redesigned by New York-based AvroKO with GREC Architects and McHugh Construction. AvroKO incorporated the geometry of jogakbo, Korea's traditional patchwork textile technique, into handcrafted motifs across carpets and lampshades, while a contemporary art program pairs Chicago creators with Korean artistic references as part of the property's deliberate discussion between its home city and Lotte's cultural origins. McHugh began demolition in August 2023 while the hotel remained operational, renovated the 14-story property from its upper floor downward beginning that November and completed a project encompassing all 191 guestrooms and corridors, a new lobby and the ground-floor restaurant. GREC's project team joined AvroKO with IMEG Corp., Arch & Co., Focus Lighting and Next Step Design, turning Lotte's American debut into a collaboration between Korean hospitality, New York interiors and Chicago architecture, engineering and construction.
Perilla Korean American Steakhouse gives that cultural exchange a distinctly Chicago culinary lineage through second-generation Korean American chef Andrew Lim, his brother Billy Lim and childhood friend Thomas Oh, whose partnership grew from the 2018 City Rock Korean Kitchen into Perilla Korean American Fare in 2019 before expanding downtown. Lim's earlier career passed through The Bristol in Bucktown, an Oakland pizzeria, a season on Nantucket and the opening teams of Formento's, Swift & Sons and Cold Storage, connecting the restaurant to several strands of contemporary Chicago dining before Perilla established its own Korean American vocabulary. The 111-seat steakhouse opened in July 2024 with grill tops built into all tables and a meat program spanning Prime beef, wagyu and Korean preparations, while Lim and Oh framed the project around their experience as Korean Americans interpreting Korean culinary culture through Chicago's deeply established steakhouse tradition. Lotte founder Shin Kyuk-ho's progression from a chewing-gum company established in Japan in 1948 to Lotte's South Korean expansion in 1967 supplies the larger corporate arc behind the hotel, allowing Lim, Oh, AvroKO and Lotte to make the Chicago property a meeting point between two entrepreneurial histories rather than a simple overseas brand extension.
How to fold L7 Chicago into your trip.
L7 Chicago works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing theater performance, civic craftsmanship and rebellious residential modernism through the Chicago Loop.
Begin at The Chicago Theatre, where Cornelius and George Rapp designed a $4 million flagship for Barney and Abe Balaban and Sam and Morris Katz that opened on October 26, 1921 with Norma Talmadge's The Sign on the Door, a 50-piece orchestra and Jesse Crawford at the Wurlitzer organ; its French Baroque composition included a five-story lobby, a staircase modeled after the Paris Opera House and a six-story State Street triumphal arch. Continue to Chicago Cultural Center, where Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge completed Chicago's $2 million permanent central library in 1897 after 8,000 books donated from England following the Great Chicago Fire had helped establish the city's public collection; Preston Bradley Hall now rises beneath a 38-foot Tiffany dome assembled from 30,000 pieces of glass, while a second dome crowns Grand Army of the Republic Hall. Conclude at Marina City, where Bauhaus-trained Bertrand Goldberg rejected the rectilinear language associated with his former teacher Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, completing twin 65-story reinforced-concrete towers in 1967 whose petal-shaped residential bays radiate from central cores as part of his effort to draw middle-class residents back downtown after postwar suburban migration. The progression moves from Rapp & Rapp's movie-palace performance through Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge's civic arts complex into Goldberg's experiment in vertical urbanism, placing L7 Chicago within a compact architectural chronology surrounding its Wabash Avenue home.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
