Hyde Park's intellectual gravity — the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, the ghosts of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition — gives the Sophy Hyde Park an unusually strong sense of place for a hotel that opened in 2018. The eight-storey brick building at 53rd Street and South Cornell Avenue was purpose-built rather than converted, its dark masonry and steel-mullioned factory windows carrying the massing of a late industrial warehouse while sitting comfortably among the neighborhood's early twentieth-century apartment blocks. The ground floor houses Mesler, a restaurant and bar whose name recalls the area's deep Chicago history, its interior anchored by a marble-topped bar under an oval halo of bare-bulb pendants and a swirling marbled ceiling treatment that veers closer to a Florentine palazzo than a Chicago tavern. The 98 rooms were designed with an art program at their center rather than as an afterthought — large-scale abstract murals mounted behind the cream upholstered headboards dissolve the boundary between artwork and architectural surface, the teal, indigo, and ochre palette bleeding into geometric-patterned rugs in navy and white and dark-stained wide-plank oak floors. The dining room at Mesler layers the same sensibility differently: yellow leather club chairs arranged around a carved pedestal table, gallery-hung artwork covering paneled walls from dado to cornice, built-in bookshelves giving the room the atmosphere of a well-loved faculty club rather than a hotel restaurant.

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