Swift & Sons

Restaurant & Bar

Chicago

IL USA

Restaurant & Bar

About

In 19th century Chicago, the cattle trade was one of the most prestigious businesses with which to be involved, with one of the industry pioneers being Gustavus Franklin Swift.

The design for the restaurant Swift & Sons, in Chicago’s popular West Loop neighborhood, takes its inspiration from this titan of the industry, re-imagining what this fictitious company’s headquarters might look like in the retro-future.

Hospitality Design Awards

Best Upscale Restaurant

LOCATION

Chicago

IL USA

Size

10,000 ft² / 929 m²

Retro-Future Tales

19th century Chicago was the era of big-business and expansion of the cattle trade, advanced by rail transport and refrigeration. Titans of industry were our muses throughout, in specific, singular and dynamic figureheads of the stockyard industry like Gustavus Franklin Swift, who ran large scale companies and battled mercilessly with competitors. Swift & Sons now occupies the old Fulton Cold Storage, a refrigerated cold storage facility that operated in the same building for decades. It had large concrete rooms of ice-covered walls, floors, and ceilings with mushroom capital columns.

Open Gallery

The Bar and Tavern Trade

Hedging transactions was pivotal in the establishment and growth of the Chicago-based commodity exchanges and futures markets, which provide the financial backbone of the city today.

The bar and tavern area in the front of the restaurant channels what a mythical trading floor would look like where deals were made via bank teller-like booths. An oversized washed-out painting of a pastoral scene caps the room in a modern nod to Victorian tradition. We may or may not have snuck the portraits of the two owners of Boka Restaurant Group, Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, into the mural, unbeknownst to them until opening.

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Warm Welcomes

As guests walk into the restaurant, the experience mirrors that of walking into a luxury, turn of the 20th century office building with high ceilings, stained glass lighting, and mosaic marble floors. The entrance boasts not only a reception desk, but also a concierge. Custom floors have five kinds of Italian marble with a traditional 19th century color palette and pattern enlarged for a modern take. Rich green panels conceal functional spaces of entrance experience. Custom globe lights connect the four corners of the room.

Raw, Refined and Layered

Throughout the space, the raw concrete columns and mushroom capitals are left exposed, providing peeks to the original architecture of the building which was (not un-ironically) once a Cold Storage facility in the middle of the meatpacking center of Chicago. The dining rooms boast a series of arched and vaulted ceilings, grand spaces to house fictional open-plan back offices replete with simple wood wainscoting and office-inspired furnishings.