Sharing a tower with Water Tower Place — the brutalist-inflected mixed-use slab designed by Loeb, Schlossman & Hackl and completed in 1975 on Michigan Avenue — placed The Ritz-Carlton Chicago in one of the most commercially ambitious structures built in postwar America, a 74-story concrete frame that houses retail, residences, and a hotel beginning on the 12th floor. The arrangement gives the hotel something unusual: guest rooms that begin well above the street, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing either the Chicago skyline massing to the south or Lake Michigan opening to the east, an expanse of blue that shifts from steel-grey to cobalt depending on the season. Recent renovations refreshed the 434 rooms in a palette of warm greige, natural oak headboards with channeled upholstery, and brass-finish side tables, the effect calibrated toward residential calm rather than corporate formality. The public spaces carry more ambition. The lobby bar, visible in the images, deploys fluted walnut millwork across walls and ceiling coffers, a marble counter in blush and cream anchored beneath a cascading installation of pendant lights in brass — a composition that draws on the mid-century Chicago tradition of richly detailed hotel interiors without reproducing it literally. The indoor lap pool, capped by a gridded skylight of steel and glass, carries an older institutional confidence that the newer interiors wisely leave intact. Together the floors span a hotel that has absorbed four decades of the city around it.

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