Lincoln Park's Belden Stratford Hotel reopening after rehab

Apr 12, 2023

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain's Chicago Business. He joined Crain's in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

Four and a half years after buying the venerable but fading Belden Stratford Hotel, Joe Mansueto's team is reopening it with a new look that takes it back a century, with recreated details from the lobby to the mansard roof.

In late 2018, Mansueto Office bought the old grande dame at 2300 N. Lincoln Park West for about $105 million. In the years since, the firm has spent roughly another $100 million on the project, according to Ari Glass, the firm's head of real estate who showed a Crain's reporter around in advance of a June 7 grand opening.

The work has entailed recreating gilt trim, ceiling murals and other features of the Louis XIV-style lobby, removing mirrored walls that blocked off mezzanine spaces and replacing hundreds of latter-day black-framed windows with new models framed in the same blue as some of the original terra cotta trim. A staircase that cut open the lobby to provide access to retailers in the basement was removed, reuniting the lobby as a sort of grand salon for residents. Also gone is a second floor that had been added to the old ballroom space in order to add apartments; the former ballroom is now a workout space with windows two stories high that look out on Lincoln Park.

"Over the years, there had been piecemeal attempts to rehab, and successive owners had put their fingerprints on it," Glass said, "but there was never one cohesive" redesign. "We saw an opportunity to do that, to stand back and look at it as a whole canvas." That was possible in large part because of the firm's long-range view of the investment.

"We didn't have to maximize the dollars we get out of it right away," Glass said.

Monthly rents in the building, which was about 40% leased as of late last week, run from $2,500 to $15,000. The largest units are three-bedrooms. Before the renovations, they maxed out at two bedrooms.

The rehabilitation, by the Chicago-based architecture firms Solomon Cordwell Buenz (SCB) and Vinci Hamp Architects, reduced the number of apartments in the building from 292 to 209. Some of the apartments that were eliminated were what Glass calls "bowling alley apartments," long, slender units with windows only at one end.

Several of those had been built out in the two former mezzanines above the east and west ends of the lobby. Both mezzanines are now common areas for residents, one with a lovely arched window — formerly the finest feature of a pair of studio apartments — and ornate gold-leaf trim recreated overhead.

The other mezzanine, where no historical details remained, has been done in a warm modern style, with a giant circular light in the ceiling and a black marble fireplace.

"We made the decision that in any space where there was no historical fabric, we went contemporary," said Alex Krikhaar, a principal at Vinci Hamp, the firm that handled the historic preservation aspects of the building. SCB is the architect of record for the overall project.

The project entailed updating many elements of the building, including its utilities, entrances, technology and amenities. Among other changes, the floor was removed beneath an old attic on the 16th floor to create high ceilings for the 15th-floor penthouses.

While the apartments have modern finishes, for the common spaces "we wanted you to walk in and immediately have the presence of the 1920s," Glass said.

Restoring the lobby, whose last major renovation was in the late 1980s, involved a fair amount of "archeological research," Krikhaar says. Original photos of the lobby were in black & white, so colors couldn't be determined that way. Serendipity played a part. Removing very-80s pinkish fabric panels from some of the lobby walls revealed that the original wood paneling and some other details were intact. Similarly, taking out side walls that flanked the entry stairs unearthed original marble. The architects hunted down matches for these unearthed materials.

There's an abundance of gilt trim in the public spaces. All of it is "where there was gilt in the 1920s," Krikhaar said.

Originally built as part of a trio of hotels on the edge of the park, the 450-room Belden Hotel later added the name Stratford in honor of William Shakespeare, a statue of whom is right across the street in the park.

Designed by architect Myer Fridstein during a wave of new apartment hotels built in the 1920s this one was, according to historian Julia Bachrach, meant to be "one of the North Side's most elegant buildings," with a mansard roof, or rounded roof cap, that gave it "a distinctly French flair."

The mansard, it turns out, held onto some clues for a century until the latest architecture team detected them. When Mansueto bought the building, nearly all its windows had black frames. But up near the top of the building were a few where the frames showed some blue paint, Krikhaar said. Combining that clue with the sight of old blue terra cotta trim between some windows sparked the realization that all the windows had originally been framed in blue.

The mansard has purple tile and carved stone flourishes. The remnants of blue "told us it had been a polychromatic building, blue with purple," Krikhaar said. "Polychromatic was popular in the 1920s." All the windows are now framed in blue.

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain's Chicago Business. He joined Crain's in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

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