Why you should experience The Guesthouse Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
The Guesthouse Hotel is a neighborly residential hotel where Andersonville's independent spirit, Swedish inheritance and storefront-scale hospitality converge through a business born directly from Chicago's housing crash.
Set along North Clark Street near West Ainslie Street and just steps from the Swedish American Museum, the hotel grew from a ten-unit luxury condominium development created by developer Dave Krug in 2008 before the recession left its residences difficult to sell. Krug responded by offering the vacant units as short-term rentals, bringing Simona Krug into the venture in 2010 as demand turned an unsuccessful real-estate project into the Andersonville Guesthouse Hotel. The couple expanded into the adjoining property with 15 additional units and reopened the enlarged 25-suite operation in June 2014 as The Guesthouse Hotel, exchanging the original condominium concept for a deliberately neighborhood-centered hospitality model. The result is a hotel whose evolution from 2008 condominium project to vacation rentals to 2014 boutique property mirrors the entrepreneurial independence that has long distinguished Clark Street.
What you should know about The Guesthouse Hotel.
The Guesthouse Hotel is best known for becoming Dave and Simona Krug's first hospitality venture and the foundation of Inherit Hotel Group, transforming a recession-era improvisation into a company that subsequently expanded beyond Chicago through Colton House Hotel in Austin and Rock Creek Resort in Red Lodge, Montana. The original ten-unit property established the residential premise before the 2014 expansion added 15 units next door, producing a 25-suite hotel composed exclusively of one-, two- and three-bedroom accommodations. Simona Krug has traced the concept to the couple's effort to combine independent living space with hotel service, while the property's “Wander Home” character turned that founding idea into the language through which the company positioned its first hotel. General Manager Rick Verkler subsequently became another named figure in the property's development, overseeing the personalized service culture that Inherit Hotel Group credits with sustaining its appeal after the Krugs moved from a single Chicago experiment toward a broader hospitality portfolio.
The building's material character carries another strand of the founders' biography through wood furnishings fashioned from a raised barn on a Wisconsin farm, an intentional reference to Dave and Simona Krug's rural Illinois upbringing that gives the interiors a direct connection to their personal history. Chicago Magazine named the property among the city's four best new hotels of 2014 only months after its June debut, identifying the Andersonville newcomer as the year's sleeper hotel hit amid an opening class that also included Soho House Chicago. Condé Nast Traveler later characterized the property as one of Chicago's few genuine neighborhood hotels, while its 25-suite scale has remained intact as Inherit Hotel Group grew around the original concept. The Krugs' failed condominium project became more consequential than a clever conversion: its 2008 crisis, 2010 vacation-rental pivot, 2014 expansion and eventual role as the prototype for Inherit Hotel Group created a hospitality business whose founding logic remains visible in the way The Guesthouse Hotel operates today.
How to fold The Guesthouse Hotel into your trip.
The Guesthouse Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Swedish migration, independent commerce and performance culture through the North Side neighborhoods surrounding Clark Street.
Begin at Swedish American Museum, founded in 1976 by Kurt Mathiasson and formally dedicated by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf during his visit to Chicago that year, before moving into its present Clark Street building in 1987 and developing The Dream of America, an installation tracing the nineteenth-century migration that made Chicago one of the most important Swedish population centers outside Sweden. Continue to Chicago Magic Lounge, where the 2018 theater occupies a former commercial laundry and revives Chicago's twentieth-century tradition of close-up magic through a purpose-built complex whose speakeasy entrance, 120-seat Harry Blackstone Cabaret and 43-seat 654 Club turn a North Clark Street building into an institutional home for an art form once embedded in the city's bars and restaurants. Conclude at Aragon Ballroom, where architects Huszagh & Hill completed the 4,500-capacity hall in 1926 for brothers William and Andrew Karzas, constructing an interior fantasy of a Spanish courtyard beneath a ceiling painted as a star-filled night sky before the venue passed from big-band dancing into decades of rock, Latin music and contemporary concerts. The progression moves from the immigrant community that shaped Andersonville through the revival of Chicago's close-up magic tradition into one of Uptown's great surviving entertainment halls, placing The Guesthouse Hotel within the cultural history that makes this stretch of the North Side fundamentally different from Downtown.
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