The Peninsula Chicago

The Peninsula Chicago is arranged like a small vertical resort set down in the Magnificent Mile. At street level, Pierrot Gourmet keeps a European café open onto Rush Street; on the 19th floor, a 25-metre pool and its Sun Terrace look out across the city.

Between the café and the water, the hotel keeps rooms that make an unusual amount of the city: windows that name the street they look at, art commissioned rather than bought in, and dressing space set apart so a week of travelling stays out of sight. In the evening the building changes character. Shanghai Terrace turns the lights down over a Chinese kitchen and the manners of a supper club, and the argument for going out anywhere else in the city becomes noticeably harder to make.

Off the Magnificent Mile

East Superior Street places the hotel in the Magnificent Mile district, near enough to the shops, the architecture and the river for a whole day to be conducted on foot. Pierrot Gourmet gives the building a door onto Rush Street and a European café behind it, so the hotel meets the city at pavement level rather than from behind a lobby desk. Chicago rewards that kind of address in fair weather and forgives it in January.

Chrysanthemums and a window table

The Grand Deluxe rooms are the ones to know. A commissioned chrysanthemum wall gives each of them a fixed point, the outlook falls to Michigan Avenue, Chicago Avenue or Rush Street, and a dining table sits at the window, which turns breakfast into something better than a tray. Dressing and luggage areas are kept apart from the living space, so several days of luggage never quite reach the living space. Suites add further space for a longer stay.

Supper club, then the pool

Shanghai Terrace was built to the memory of a 1930s supper club, in lacquer and low light, with a kitchen drawing on Shanghainese, Cantonese and Sichuanese cooking. It makes a persuasive case against going out. The counterweight is 19 floors up, where the pool sits in a room of windows with the city arranged below. Few hotels hold a long swim and a supper club in the same building, and the distance between them is the whole appeal.