Pendry Chicago ★★★★

A Champagne-Bottle Skyscraper Turned Hotel

Pendry Chicago occupies the Carbide & Carbon Building, a 1929 tower designed by the Burnham Brothers, sons of the city planner Daniel Burnham, and shaped, according to long-standing local lore, like a champagne bottle in a wink at Prohibition. The dark green terracotta façade and its gold leaf accents made the building instantly recognizable on Michigan Avenue, and the lobby still runs on Belgian marble, polished black granite, and bronze trim from the original 1929 build. The tower's forty stories made it one of the tallest buildings on Michigan Avenue when it opened, a height Pendry now rents out one skyline view at a time from the roof. Chicago named it a landmark in 1996, and when Pendry opened the hotel in 2021, the brief was restoration rather than renovation: the Art Deco details stayed, the hotel got built around them.

Why It Works

We chose Pendry Chicago because the building was already the attraction before the hotel brand ever arrived. Few hotels anywhere start with a landmarked Art Deco skyscraper designed around a 1920s in-joke, and Pendry's restoration leans into that rather than smoothing it into a generic lobby. Château Carbide, the rooftop bar near the top of the tower, turns the building's own height into the view, and Venteux's French brasserie menu gives the ground floor a reason to draw Michigan Avenue regulars who aren't staying the night. The brand's choice to keep the original signage and detailing instead of stripping the building down to a blank luxury shell is itself part of the pitch.

Why This Location

230 North Michigan Avenue sits in the Loop, steps from the Chicago River, Millennium Park, and the Magnificent Mile's shopping stretch, with the building's own Art Deco neighbors, the Wrigley Building among them, visible from the rooftop. It's an address built for walking: the Art Institute, the Michigan Avenue bridge, and the river's architecture boat tours are all close enough to reach on foot, and trains from nearby Loop stations cover anything farther out. Few hotel addresses in Chicago put a guest this close to both the river and the lake in the same walk.

Fast Facts

• Prix: €€€€

• Vibe: Art Deco landmark, rooftop views, Michigan Avenue address

• Chambres: rooms across the 40-story Carbide & Carbon Building, restored rather than rebuilt

• Best For: design-minded travelers, Michigan Avenue regulars, couples wanting a rooftop view with dinner

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: Château Carbide's rooftop view over the building's own Art Deco neighbors

• Dining: Venteux (French brasserie), Bar Pendry, Château Carbide rooftop bar, The Library lounge

• Amenities: rooftop bar, in-room dining, event spaces inside the landmark building

• Attractions: Millennium Park, the Magnificent Mile, the Chicago River and its architecture boat tours

A Landmark Restored Rather Than Rebuilt

The restoration kept the building's signature material palette: Belgian marble floors, polished black granite, and bronze trim running through the lobby, with frosted glass fixtures and gold embellishments carried through from the 1929 interiors. Rooms sit inside a tower built for Union Carbide and Carbon Co.'s executives rather than for hotel guests, which shows in details like the building's unusually generous floor-to-ceiling heights and the dark green terracotta visible from inside at the right angle. Even the building's structural quirks, odd-shaped executive suites built for a 1920s company rather than standard hotel geometry, became part of the room plan instead of being renovated away. The result reads less like a themed hotel than an office tower's Art Deco interiors kept intact and quietly reprogrammed.

What to Know Before You Check In

Château Carbide draws a crowd for sunset, so a reservation matters more here than at a standard hotel bar, especially in summer when the rooftop is the obvious draw on Michigan Avenue. The Loop location means weekday mornings bring business foot traffic past the building's entrance, while weekends tilt toward couples and visitors working through the Magnificent Mile and the museum campus along the lake. Valet and self-parking both run Loop rates, and the hotel's Michigan Avenue entrance can be easy to miss among its taller, more modern neighbors, worth watching for specifically.