What guests are saying
What guests love
- A genuine Art Deco tower with character, restored for a modern, playful stay.
- A central Loop address steps from the river, State Street, and the theatre district.
- Buzzy bars and a rooftop scene with skyline views.
What to keep in mind
- A slim historic tower — rooms vary
- A busy Loop block, lively at night
- Mid-conversion to a Sports Illustrated points-ownership resort (open during the works; completion expected late 2026)
Best for Design- and nightlife-minded travelers who want a characterful Art Deco base in the center of the Loop.
Summary of guest reviews. Sources: Sports Illustrated Chicago former Virgin Hotel Chicago, Commission on Chicago Landmarks, Preservation Chicago. Photography courtesy of Sports Illustrated Resorts Chicago, used with permission. Designation report: Old Dearborn Bank Building (L-157) at Chicago Landmark Reports. Details may change over time.
Why this building matters
The hotel occupies the Old Dearborn Bank Building, a 1928 Art Deco high-rise just steps from the Chicago River and the State Street shopping and theatre districts. Carefully restored when Virgin Hotels opened here in 2015, the building keeps its Jazz-Age bones while the hotel layers in a lively, contemporary spirit.
Look up from the ‘L’
The designation report opens with an instruction rather than a description. Ride the Loop elevated round the corner of Lake and Wabash and look up, it says, and you will be met by gryphons, mythical figureheads and other fantastic ornament staring back down at the train. It is the best way to see this building, and most people pass it without noticing.
The ornament is the point. Chicago skyscrapers of the 1920s were, as a rule, sober in color and restrained in decoration. This one is warm and earthy and frankly exotic — closer in spirit to the Art Deco going up in New York and Los Angeles than to anything else on Wabash.
There is a reason for that, and it is the best fact about the building: it was designed by C. W. and George L. Rapp, the brothers who built Chicago’s movie palaces. By 1928 Rapp & Rapp were internationally known for the engineering and the sheer flamboyance of their theaters, and they were almost never asked to design a free-standing office block. This is one of only two they ever built, and the only one in their own city.
The architects next door, and the cheese man’s bank
The bank opened in 1919 as the Lake-State Bank, and its first chairman of the board was James L. Kraft — the same Kraft who built the cheese company. Its first offices were around the corner on State Street, in what The Economist then called “an apparently neglected part of the business district.”
That changed fast. The Michigan Avenue Bridge opened in 1920, Wacker Drive went under construction, and the wholesale produce markets that had filled the area around South Water Street were pushed miles west, leaving prime ground behind. The Jewelers Building of 1926 — now the LIVN — set the pace, the Wabash Avenue Bridge opened in 1927, and suddenly this end of the Loop was fashionable.
The bank bought a vacant corner lot at Wabash and Lake in 1925 and hired its architects from very close by: Rapp & Rapp kept their offices on the top floor of the State-Lake Building immediately next door, and had already put the Chicago Theatre and the Oriental within a few streets. The building cost $1.5 million and opened in 1928.
You can still sleep in the rest of their work. The Oriental Theatre building holds the Cambria, and their Bismarck Hotel is now the Allegro — three Rapp & Rapp buildings in the Loop taking guests tonight, and only this one was ever meant to be offices.
Drawn from the building’s Chicago Landmark designation report. Read the report →
Worth stepping inside for
The grand staircase in the first-floor lobby is protected along with the exterior — worth a look even if you are not staying.
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