A New Kind of ACE
ACE Hotel has always held a secret special place in my heart - I stayed at the ACE Hotel New York in 2015 when I attended EverUp (and first met AdamJK). I also had my fill of amazing sweet and spicy popcorn at the ACE Portland earlier this year. (Check out the full Portland Guide.)
Knowing this, it's no surprise that when the ACE Chicago announced special previews in July prior to the full grand opening in September, I had to get in on the action.
The Details
Here's what Chicago Mag had to say about the coming opening:
"It’s official: after two-plus years of rumors, Ace Hotel has confirmed that its first Chicago property will open this fall in the Fulton Market District. The boutique hotel will bring new life to a former Italian-American cheesemaking factory at 311 North Morgan Street, just across the street from 1KFulton, Google’s Midwest headquarters.
Ace Hotel Chicago will have 159 rooms designated as small, medium, double, or large; small rooms will be around 275 square feet and medium rooms just slightly larger at 290 square feet. Nine of the rooms will be suites ranging from 650 to 800 square feet. For food, there's City Mouse, the first Stumptown Coffee Roasters café in the Midwest, and a large lobby bar.
There will also be a seventh-floor rooftop bar and terrace open year-round with both indoor and outdoor spaces. The sixth floor will have meeting rooms. Count them among seven, multi-floor event spaces—more than you’ll find at any other Ace property—that will be open to everyone.
And like other Ace hotels, we can look forward to a design that’s both laid-back and hyper cool. Led by LA-based Commune Design, the look and feel will pull cues from Chicago’s modernist history, nodding to greats like Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and László Moholy-Nagy with his New Bauhaus design. Mod rooms will have glossy wood-grain desks, marble walls and ceilings, and old-school turntables. Look for sawtooth skylights and oak parquet flooring in the first-floor event space as well as a sculpture garden and outdoor seating on the paved fifth-floor terrace, which will span 2,876 square feet.
Ace Hotel Chicago will be the next hotel to open in Fulton Market since the debut of Soho House Chicago in 2014. Rooms will likely start around $219 a night."
The official opening is set for September 1st (just in time for Labor Day Weekend).
My Experience
To celebrate the weekend at the ACE, I invited a group of entrepreneurs to dinner at City Mouse. We ate at the establishment the night after food service began and our meals were divine. Between us, we tried nearly every cocktail on the menu and both the burger and the caviar shooters were big hits.
After dinner, we were treated to a private tour of some of the ACE's nearly-finished spaces, including one of the A-Suites, as well as the family rooms (two connected rooms, one with two double beds and one with a king).
Once everyone else left, my partner and I settled into the ACE for an incredible weekend of relaxation enhanced by some of my favorite Fulton Market highlights!
The ACE Chicago is definitely on par with other ACE Hotels I've experienced and I'm excited to see how the property and the company are able to shape Chicago's West Loop.
