Lakeview Days Inn getting boutique hotel makeover

As anticipated, the Lakeview Days Inn hotel located in a vintage masonry building on the northwest corner of the busy Diversey, Clark, and Broadway intersection is set for a major aesthetic and branding overhaul. Oxford Hotels & Resorts, the group behind the LondonHouse and Godrey Hotel projects in the greater downtown area, has announced that it will be renovating the nearly century-old building into a new boutique hotel called Hotel Versey.

The announcement suggests that the new 135-room hotel project will be aimed at younger travelers and tourists. “The building’s prominent location gives us a great opportunity to serve a diverse range of travelers seeking a more authentic, neighborhood experience,” Oxford CEO John W. Rutledge said in the press release. While the project will become just one of 13 Oxford hotels in Chicago, the redevelopment of the Days Inn is the first neighborhood venture for the company.

In terms of design choices and aesthetic, there’s not much to extract other than buzzy words and catchphrases suggesting that the new hotel project will feature a “bold design” and a “quirky personality.” However, Oxford suggests that project will pay homage to its history as a jazz club in the 1920s. In addition, the announcement also indicates that a new restaurant will join the project.

While the boom of new hotel projects has slowed in the last year, developers seem to have shifted the focus to smaller “lifestyle” hotels that cater to the budget-minded millennial set, and it’s highly likely that the new Hotel Versey project will compete with newer millennial-focused offerings like the Freehand in River North and the recently opened Robey in Wicker Park.

Update: The team behind the new Hotel Versey have written to clarify that the project will not be specifically targeting millennial travelers, but instead will be meant “for fun-loving locals and travelers looking for an authentic Chicago neighborhood experience, regardless of age.” They add that with its location near DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus, Boystown, and Wrigleyville, that “the important thing to note that it is a celebration of all that make up this melting pot of an axis between the diverse areas.”