Brad then became a General Manager, where they continued to excel in sales, breaking club sales records multiple times. During this time, they achieved significant growth in membership revenue and increased the total number of members. Brad joined Midtown Athletic Clubs in 2002, initially working as an Operations Manager and Sales Director. It adds up to a natural destination for an active traveler or an obvious “staycation” for someone who wants to trade the kids and the suburbs for a day of tennis, swimming and the spa, followed by dinner in the city and then breakfast at the hotel, overlooking the outdoor pool.Brad Houx has extensive work experience in the fitness industry. One room was designed by the Florida-based firm owned by tennis star Venus Williams, V-Starr Interiors. Rooms are simple, clean and sleek, and flooded with natural light through broad windows. The exercise areas and indoor pool, naturally, feel like a fitness center, but the outdoor pool and restaurant seem more like they belong to a hotel. Spaces are a fusion of athletic center and hotel. In a bid to create a high-end experience, there are elaborate finishings in all directions, including faux greenery on the walls and goose feather chandeliers in the locker rooms. MacEwen’s Evanston-based DMAC Architecture designed and built the hotel, coming up with a structure that’s long on sturdy, rustic materials: stone, glass, wood, granite and even tall birch trunks, used “as a threshold between public and private space,” MacEwen said. As architect Dwayne MacEwen said, “It’s 94 percent amenities and 6 percent hotel.” When you’re sleeping, who cares where you are? But when awake, Midtown offers guests something most hotels don’t: a world-class health club. The synergy is particularly strong on the hotel side. “We’re in a stage in the hotel industry and the club industry where, marrying them the way we have, you create a whole different category,” he said.

“I don’t recommend doing it this way.”īut, he said, once the idea struck him, it seemed obvious.

“It was really hard and really expensive and really out of sequence,” Schwartz said. Though there is at least one nearby hotel - the 69-room Robey opened in Wicker Park last year, a mile south - The Hotel at Midtown furthers a recent trend of neighborhood boutique hotels.Įxecuting the hotel at the moment of Schwartz’s inspiration was not simple the developer needed to pivot on a work in progress, shifting the foundation from concrete to steel. “We’re in the middle of some of the greatest neighborhoods in Chicago, and there are no hotels at all,” said Schwartz, who worked in the hotel industry for six years before joining Midtown, a company launched by his father and grandfather in 1970. It was, he said, the proverbial lightbulb moment. The idea to include a hotel came after ground had been broken, as Schwartz stood chatting on the top floor of the parking garage. Schwartz, who operates eight Midtown clubs, four of which are in the Chicago area, figured the opportunity presented a chance to build a gleaming, 100,000-square-foot fitness center in addition to his 16 remaining indoor tennis courts. “We wanted to diversify.”ĭiversification has come in the form of a handsome fitness center that includes rows of machines, classes galore, an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, a full-service spa, a boxing studio, a golf course simulator and a restaurant called Chromium that tilts more decadent than health-conscious.Ībove all that, on the top two floors of the five-story building, is the hotel that offers views of downtown and the Kennedy Expressway from one side, and the Damen Avenue Bridge and an old power plant from the other.Ĭosting upward of $80 million, the project is rooted in the city’s plan to reconfigure the intersection of Fullerton, Damen and Elston avenues, which caused Midtown to lose its 15,000-square-foot fitness center and a tennis court. “You satisfy your members more when you offer more,” Schwartz added. Though Schwartz said the tennis club remains profitable enough to operate on its own, “people don’t play tennis as their only source of activity anymore,” he said.

The result is the Midtown Athletic Club, which opened Labor Day weekend, and The Hotel at Midtown, which debuted earlier this month. to reinvent itself for a 21st-century audience. “If you’re looking for our bible, that’s it,” said Midtown’s president and CEO, Steven Schwartz.įounded nearly 50 years ago as Midtown Tennis Club, a changing neighborhood, changing city and changing consumer tastes have led the property at 2444 N. You’ll find a slim, 122-page paperback copy of the “Official Rules of Tennis.” Slide open the bedside drawer in the 55 rooms at The Hotel at Midtown and you won’t find the Bible.

Steven schwartz midtown athletic club