At Optima, outdoor space is built into the architecture. Terraces and rooftop decks are an integral part of the design, which is why the line between inside and outside reads as continuous. How that continuity feels depends on where a community sits, and the difference between the Chicago area and Scottsdale is where it shows most clearly.

The Private Terrace

The private terrace is the starting point. Across the communities, residences open onto balconies deep enough to hold furniture and to work as an extension of the living space. The effect is that the outdoors begins at the glass and continues outward, giving each home a usable room in the open air.

The Rooftop Deck

Above the residences, the rooftop decks hold the shared outdoor life of each building. These sky decks bring together pools, lounges, and open seating with the long views that come from being at the top of the structure, and they offer residents a setting for time outside beyond that of a private terrace. They are designed to be used all day, and they anchor the social side of each community.

Chicago and the North Shore

In Chicago and on the North Shore, the relationship between interior and exterior follows the seasons. At Optima Signature in Streeterville and at Optima Lakeview, the warmer months open the balconies and rooftop decks fully, while the colder months move some of outdoor life behind glass. The indoor pool at Optima Signature stays in use year-round, which keeps water and daylight part of the experience even when the outdoor pool is closed for the season. At Optima Lakeview, the rooftop pool is heated and stays open year-round, so residents can spend time outside at the top of the building even through the coldest months. At Optima Verdana in Wilmette, retractable glass walls open or close around the pool inside, so the space stays usable through every season and opens to the air when the weather allows. The design accounts for both warm and cold conditions, so the connection to the outdoors holds in either one.

Scottsdale

In Scottsdale, the same spaces work on a longer calendar. At Optima Sonoran Village, Optima Kierland Apartments, and Optima McDowell Mountain, the climate keeps the terraces and rooftop decks in use through most of the year, and the design builds in shade for the hottest part of the day. At Optima Sonoran Village, the residences in Tower 15 include private yards, giving those homes a ground-level connection to the outdoors alongside the balconies above. The result is a setting where outdoor living is closer to a daily habit than a seasonal one.

One Intent Across Both Regions

What stays constant across both regions is the intent. Whether the outdoor space is open for part of the year or most of it, it is planned as part of the home and part of the building, with the same attention given to a private balcony as to the interior it adjoins. That is what lets the relationship between the balcony and the building feel deliberate in every Optima community.

Explore our communities to see how the outdoor spaces take shape across Chicago, the North Shore, and Scottsdale.

Having people over is one of the quiet pleasures of a good home. A dinner with close friends, a weekend visit from family, a casual gathering that runs longer than expected because the space just works, these are the moments that make where you live feel like somewhere worth being. Optima communities are designed to support all of it, with shared spaces and in-building amenities that make hosting less logistically complicated and more genuinely enjoyable.

The Demonstration Kitchen

At the center of hosting well is usually a kitchen, and Optima communities approach this practically. Across the portfolio, residents have access to fully equipped demonstration kitchens, purpose-built spaces with professional-grade equipment, ample prep surfaces, and room to move. These aren’t afterthought catering setups tucked into a back corridor; they’re considered rooms, designed for the experience of cooking together or cooking for others.

Whether you’re hosting a small dinner where guests gather at the counter or planning something more structured for a larger group, the demonstration kitchen offers a practical alternative to working within the footprint of a private residence. The kitchen handles the scale; the party room typically adjacent to it handles the seating and gathering.

Party Rooms and Shared Entertaining Spaces

Each Optima community includes reservable party rooms and lounge spaces that can be configured for different kinds of gatherings. The formats vary by property, some feature retractable glass walls that open onto outdoor terraces, others connect directly to rooftop sky decks with outdoor kitchens, fire pits, and lounge seating, but the underlying idea is consistent. These spaces exist because hosting well sometimes requires more square footage than a single residence provides, and because some occasions benefit from a setting that feels intentionally set apart from day-to-day life.

Outdoor entertaining spaces extend the options further. Rooftop sky decks across the portfolio offer areas for barbecuing, gathering around fire pits, and dining outside with views of the surrounding city or landscape.

When Guests Stay Overnight

For longer visits, all Optima communities offer reservable guest suites, furnished accommodations that give visiting family or friends a comfortable, private space of their own. It’s an easy way to host overnight company without giving up a home office or reshuffling a room that wasn’t built for it. The resident keeps their apartment exactly as they like it, and the guest gets a great place to stay. At Optima Verdana and Optima McDowell Mountain, guest suites open this fall.

The Home Kitchen’s Role

While shared amenities handle larger-scale hosting, the private residences themselves are designed with entertaining in mind. Kitchens across Optima communities are built around open-concept layouts with generous counter space and finishes that hold up to the kind of use that comes with having people over. Floor-to-ceiling windows and connections between kitchen and living areas mean that the person cooking isn’t separated from the room where guests are gathered, the layout keeps everyone in the same space.

Hosting Without the Production

Part of what makes hosting feel like a pleasure rather than a project is not having to think too hard about logistics. At Optima communities, the combination of well-appointed private kitchens, reservable demonstration kitchens, flexible party rooms, outdoor gathering spaces, and guest suite options means that the infrastructure for having people over is simply part of living there. The planning can focus on the people and the occasion rather than on working around the limitations of the space.

Explore our communities to see the spaces for yourself

Time is one of the few things that genuinely can’t be recovered. And while it rarely appears on a floor plan or in an amenity list, proximity, how close you are to where you need to go and how reliably you can get there, shapes daily life in ways that are hard to overstate.

Across Optima’s communities in Chicago and Scottsdale, the relationship between location and how people live looks different depending on the city, the neighborhood, and what a given resident actually needs. But in each case, the decision to site a building where it sits was made with that relationship in mind.

Downtown Chicago: On Foot, by Bus, or Along the Lake

In Streeterville, a large portion of daily life unfolds within walking distance. Optima Signature sits a block from Michigan Avenue, with the lakefront path, the Riverwalk, the Loop, and dozens of restaurants and shops reachable without getting into a car or waiting for a train. CTA bus service along Michigan Avenue offers multiple routes running throughout the day, and the Grand Avenue Red Line station is about a seven-minute walk from the building.

For residents who work in the Loop or along the Magnificent Mile, the commute can effectively be zero in the way most people think of commutes. Dinner reservations, coffee, weekend errands: most of it happens within the same walkable radius. Streeterville is built for that kind of proximity, with daily life folded into a few square blocks.

Lakeview: Transit-Oriented, Neighborhood-Rooted

Optima Lakeview sits in one of Chicago’s most transit-rich residential neighborhoods. The Red Line at Addison is within walking distance, and Belmont station, where the Red, Brown, and Purple lines converge, is also accessible on foot. From Addison or Belmont, a Red Line ride south to the Loop typically runs 15 to 25 minutes depending on time of day.

What’s notable about Lakeview as a location is what it enables beyond the commute itself. Multiple CTA bus routes fill in the east-west connections and off-peak gaps that rail doesn’t cover. The Broadway corridor offers grocery stores, pharmacies, and a dense concentration of restaurants, which means that even on days when residents aren’t commuting, the neighborhood is navigable without a car. The community’s ground-floor retail extends that walkable utility directly into the building.

Wilmette: The Metra Advantage

Optima Verdana in downtown Wilmette occupies a position that most suburban developments don’t come close to achieving, it sits directly across Green Bay Road from the Wilmette Metra commuter rail station. For residents who commute into downtown Chicago, this proximity makes a meaningful difference. The Union Pacific North line runs from Wilmette to Chicago’s Ogilvie Transportation Center in the Loop, connecting the two with consistent timing across the day.

The location also puts residents within walking distance of Wilmette’s Village Center, with shops, cafes, and services immediately accessible on foot. More than 60 acres of lakefront, including beaches and a sailing harbor, are within walking distance as well. What Verdana offers, that a car-dependent North Shore address doesn’t, is the option to leave the car behind without losing the ease of getting anywhere you need to go.

Scottsdale: A Different Definition of Proximity

In Scottsdale, proximity gets measured differently. There’s no rail system shaping the conversation, so what matters is what’s reachable by car in a few minutes, and what’s reachable on foot without one.

Optima Sonoran Village sits in Old Town Scottsdale, across from Scottsdale Fashion Square, with restaurants, galleries, and nightlife within walking distance. Camelback Mountain’s hiking and biking trails are close by as well.

Optima Kierland sits on Kierland Boulevard in North Scottsdale, steps from both Kierland Commons and Scottsdale Quarter. Restaurants, coffee, shopping, and entertainment are reachable without a car for residents who want that option. For longer trips across the Valley, the Loop 101 offers direct access to Scottsdale, Tempe, and Phoenix. Phoenix Sky Harbor is approximately 18 miles away. The community’s position means residents with demanding schedules can move efficiently in either direction, into the urban core or out toward the desert.

Optima McDowell Mountain sits right at Scottsdale Road and Loop 101, so residents are already at the freeway rather than driving to it. That gives direct access to the Valley’s freeway network in either direction, alongside a walking and biking radius close to home. Restaurants, retail, and everyday grocery stops are reachable on foot, and the nearby mountain views and trail access add a kind of value that doesn’t show up in a walk score: open space and a sense of retreat, right alongside the convenience.

What Location Actually Gives You

In practical terms, a well-chosen location gives residents time back, not necessarily in large blocks, but in the accumulated minutes of a week where a commute is predictable, an errand is walkable, and getting somewhere doesn’t require planning your whole day around it.

Optima’s communities differ in what their locations offer, because the neighborhoods themselves differ. What stays consistent is the deliberate decision of the siting: each building’s location was chosen for what surrounds it, and that surrounding context is part of what makes living there work.

Explore Optima’s communities across Chicago and Scottsdale to see how location shapes daily life at each one.

Summer means something different depending on where you spend it. In Chicago, it is the season residents wait for through a long winter: the months when the lakefront fills up, the windows stay open, and the parts of a building that went quiet in the cold come back into daily use. In Scottsdale, summer is the season to work around. The heat sets the schedule, and life shifts toward the cooler hours at either end of the day, with the middle reserved for shade and the indoors.

Optima designs, builds, and operates its communities, so the way each one meets its season is deliberate rather than incidental. The planted terraces, the integration of indoor and outdoor space, and the amenity floors set throughout the building are all drawn for the climate they sit in.

Summer in Chicago

In Chicago and the North Shore, summer is when the outdoor spaces do most of the work. The flowers bloom, the sky decks open, and the rooftop that felt exposed in January becomes the most used space in the building. Evenings stretch late, so residents drift outside after work: dinner on a terrace, a swim before the sun goes down, an easy walk to the water. The floor-to-ceiling glass that keeps the interiors bright all year now opens onto a season that rewards being outside.

Summer in Scottsdale

In Scottsdale, the rhythm runs the other way. The hottest stretch of the year pulls activity indoors and toward the edges of the day. Mornings begin early, before the heat sets in, which is when the pools and the shaded paths get used. By midday the interior amenities take over: the fitness centers, the lap pools, and the cooled lounges. The architecture does steady, quiet work through all of it. The vertical landscaping that wraps the buildings and the deep terraces keep direct sun off the glass, so the interiors stay comfortable without leaning as hard on the cooling system. Life moves back outdoors in the evening, once the heat lifts.

Built for the place

What the two regions share is an approach. Each Optima community is conceived as a complete environment rather than a building with amenities attached, and that environment is tuned into where it stands. In Chicago that means spaces that open outward and make the most of a short season. In Scottsdale it means spaces that hold their comfort through a long summer. The same design thinking sits behind both, carried from the drawing through to the way the building is run.

Explore our communities across Chicago and Scottsdale to see how this approach carries from one place to the next.

There’s a particular kind of friction that makes fitness routines hard to sustain: the getting-there part. When the gym requires a separate membership, a commute, and a fixed class time that doesn’t bend to the rest of life, the routine becomes harder to keep. One busy week is often enough to break it.

At Optima, the fitness center sits within the same building as the home, and that proximity changes how people actually use it.

Proximity as the Missing Variable

Most conversations about fitness habits focus on motivation or the right workout plan. But the simpler factor that tends to matter more is the distance. The closer a habit is to where you already are, the more likely you are to repeat it. When the fitness center is a short elevator ride away, accessible early in the morning or late at night, it stops being an event you schedule and becomes a part of your day.

This is the logic behind how Optima designs fitness amenities across its communities in Illinois and Arizona. The centers are built to be genuinely complete, not a few treadmills in an afterthought of a room, so that residents can work through a full range of training goals without needing anything else. Cardio equipment, free weights, strength training, dedicated yoga space, and often Pilates studios occupy the same connected floor, making it easy to shift between kinds of movement depending on the day.

Built for the Full Range of Fitness Goals

At Optima Signature in Streeterville, the fitness center is paired with a yoga studio, an indoor lap pool, an indoor and outdoor saunas, steam rooms, and a cold plunge. Personal training, yoga, and Pilates classes are available through an on-site partnership, and a Reform Studios Pilates location just steps outside the building adds reformer work as well.

Optima Lakeview brings that same range to the Lakeview neighborhood. The fitness center overlooks the building’s sky-lit atrium and includes cardio and strength equipment, free weights, squat racks, and a dedicated yoga and stretching studio. Complimentary towel service, weekly classes, and personal training are available, and the year-round heated rooftop pool is there for residents whose routines include swimming.

Optima Verdana in Wilmette pairs a fully equipped fitness center with a yoga studio and massage room. Fitness programming includes yoga, HIIT, Pilates, water aerobics, and personal training, so residents have organized options alongside the freedom to use the space on their own schedule.

The Scottsdale Communities

In Scottsdale, the fitness amenities reflect the scale of the buildings. At Optima Kierland Apartments, each of the towers has its own dedicated fitness spaces. The 7160 tower features a 16,000-square-foot fitness center with locker rooms, a steam room, sauna, hot and cold plunges and a massage room. Tower 7140 offers roughly 27,000 square feet of wellness amenities including indoor and outdoor fitness areas, a rooftop yoga studio, and a rooftop running track. Tower 7190 continues that with an indoor/outdoor fitness center, free weights, stretching areas, and an outdoor pickleball court and golf area. On-site massage therapy, fitness classes, and personal training are available across all towers.

At Optima Sonoran Village, the 24-hour fitness center includes treadmills, bikes, stair climbers, free weights, and Life Fitness Signature Series strength equipment alongside a basketball court and golf simulator. The glass-enclosed center looks out over the indoor lap pool, keeping the transition between training and recovery easy. Saunas, steam rooms, and a spa complete the offering.

At Optima McDowell Mountain, the fitness center includes indoor and outdoor training areas, Pilates and yoga studios, locker rooms, and spa-adjacent spaces with a sauna, hot and cold plunges and a massage room, all looking out over the landscaped courtyard.

Recovery as Part of the Routine

Steam rooms, saunas, hot and cold plunges, and spa services appear across Optima communities because recovery is treated as part of the routine. Being able to move from a workout directly into a sauna or steam room, and then back upstairs, makes it easier to keep that part of the routine intact when time is limited. Massage booking through the buildings resident services app and partner programs extends this further, without requiring a separate appointment somewhere else.

A Low-Friction Environment

What Optima’s fitness amenities offer, more than any particular piece of equipment or programming, is a low-friction environment for showing up regularly. There’s no car to park, no membership card for another place, no commute in weather that doesn’t cooperate. There’s just the elevator, a pair of shoes, and whatever the day calls for.

Explore Optima’s communities across Illinois and Arizona and schedule a tour to see the amenities firsthand.

The first months in an Optima community are about discovery, finding the best chair in the lounge, learning the rhythm of the pool deck, figuring out which elevator is fastest in the morning. But residents who have been here for years carry something different, a quieter familiarity with the building and the people inside it that turns an apartment into a home and a community into something closer to a small neighborhood with its own habits and its own sense of place.

The building becomes intuitive

Over time the building becomes second nature. Longtime residents move through it with an ease that comes from repetition, knowing which lounge is quiet in the afternoon, which corner of the pool gets the best late light, which spot in the fitness center has the best view through the glass. The architecture that first impresses through its scale and clean lines slowly becomes more personal, a set of spaces that hold the small daily rituals of life in a way that feels both designed and entirely natural.

Relationships that build slowly

The more meaningful changes are about the people. Relationships at Optima tend to build slowly, through small repeated encounters at the coffee bar or the dog run or in the elevator, until the neighbors who were once polite strangers have become genuine friends. Community here does not arrive through any single event or introduction. It accumulates through shared daily life, where you see the same people at the same times in the same places until you find yourself genuinely curious about how their week is going. There are residents who have watched each other’s children grow up across the hallway, residents who have moved within the building while staying in the community they consider home, and friendships that began with a lobby conversation neither person can quite remember the start of.

Knowing the rhythms

Staying for years also means understanding the rhythms of the place. There are weeks when the pool deck is busy in the morning and quiet by late afternoon, and seasons when the courtyards fill up or the fitness centers carry the most traffic. Longtime residents tend to know the quieter mid-week evenings worth claiming for themselves and the weekend mornings when everyone seems to gather around for coffee. This is the kind of knowledge that cannot be communicated in a tour, and it is one of the reasons residents stay as long as they do.

The staff who know you

Then there is the staff. The concierge who knows when your packages arrive, the maintenance team familiar with your apartment’s quirks, the management team who knows your name and your preferences. These relationships deepen across the years until the people running the building feel less like service providers and more like familiar faces who are part of the daily texture of home.

Art that grows with you

Living alongside the art changes with time too. The Kiwi sculpture at Optima Signature, the Curves and Voids sculpture at Optima Verdana, the Duo sculpture at Optima Kierland, the sculpture garden at Optima Sonoran Village, the atrium at Optima Lakeview, these are works that reward sustained attention. Longtime residents often notice things they had walked past for months, the way light falls on a Cor-Ten surface in the late afternoon, the way a sculpture reads differently in summer than in winter. The art is not meant to be experienced once. It lives alongside residents over years, becoming familiar in a way that opens up new attention rather than closing it off.

The deeper definition of home

What years in an Optima community look like, in the end, is a slow deepening of what the word home actually means. It is the difference between an apartment you occupy and a place you belong to, the steady accumulation of small familiarities, daily rituals that take shape without anyone planning them, and friendships built through proximity and repetition. Residents who have stayed long term tend to speak about their communities with the warmth of people who have made a real life inside a place rather than simply passing through it.

Explore our communities to find the one that fits the life you want to build.

Most people move into an Optima community expecting a beautiful home, but what they often do not expect is how quickly the building itself becomes a partner in their day. The package waiting at the door without a single text exchange, the trainer who already knows their name by the second visit, the pool that is somehow always the right temperature, and the events calendar that gives a Tuesday evening something to look forward to are not perks layered onto a residence but rather the residence itself, reshaping what daily life feels like in ways that are hard to anticipate before the move and impossible to imagine giving up afterward.

To understand the shift, it helps to look at what an ordinary day actually contained before, and what fills it after.

Before

The day used to begin with a small inventory of things that needed handling personally, from the gym membership across town to the dry cleaner who closed before you got home, the package that needed someone home to receive it, and the repair that required three phone calls to schedule and a vacation day to oversee. None of it was unmanageable, and that was almost the problem, because it was the steady arithmetic of running a home alone, and it quietly absorbed the hours that should have gone to other things.

Social life lived on the calendar, workouts lived on the calendar, and even relaxation, when it happened, tended to live on the calendar as well, fitted into the gaps between obligations. The home was a base of operations, and the operations never stopped.

After

The first thing that changes is who is in your corner, because Optima communities are run by on-site teams who treat the building as a hospitality experience rather than an address. The concierge knows the regulars, the maintenance team responds in hours rather than days with the kind of attention to detail that keeps a small problem small, and the package room handles the deliveries that used to organize a week around them. None of this is glamorous on a brochure, but all of it becomes transformative the first time it happens to you and quietly essential by the tenth.

The day then begins to rebuild around what is actually available within the building itself. The fitness center is downstairs, which means morning workouts stop competing with the commute, while heated pools turn swimming into a year-round practice rather than a seasonal hobby, and the saunas, steam rooms, and spa spaces give the body somewhere to recover that is not a separate appointment in a separate part of town. The work-from-home days have an actual office to retreat to, with conference rooms and quiet spaces designed for focus, so the kitchen table goes back to being a kitchen table.

The smaller conveniences are quieter and more constant in their effect, with dog wash rooms removing the chaos of a muddy afternoon, demonstration kitchens turning a dinner party into something you host rather than orchestrate, and outdoor lounges, fire pits, and rooftop terraces giving the warm evenings somewhere to go. Guest suites mean visiting family no longer requires giving up the couch, and curated events ranging from wellness classes to art tours to social gatherings fill the calendar with things the on-site team has already planned, so connection stops requiring effort to arrange.

The Building Knows You

This is the part that is hardest to convey before someone has lived it, because at Optima the staff is not a service tier but a relationship. The front desk team greets you by name, the wellness team remembers what you are training for, and the leasing and management teams know the rhythms of the building because they are in it every day, which translates into a level of care that is almost impossible to find in a residence of any other kind. A request rarely needs to be explained twice, a favor is often already done, and the building begins to feel less like a property and more like a place that knows you, which is a different and rarer thing entirely.

That sense of being known is what residents come back to when they describe the Optima difference. The fitness center, the pool, the lounges, and the terraces are all part of the picture, but the deeper truth is that life at Optima has been thoughtfully organized around what actually makes a day feel good, with ease, beauty, health, and connection in place of the small frictions that used to fill the hours between them.

What Residents Notice First

Sleep tends to improve within weeks, as the space is quieter, the light is better, and the body is moving more because moving has become easier than not moving. Social life expands as well, because the events are already on the schedule and the friends are often a few floors away, while the weekends open up because the maintenance that used to fill them is being handled by people whose work that is. The cooking gets better in kitchens that were made to be cooked in, and the work gets calmer in workspaces that were made to be worked in, and none of these shifts are individually dramatic, yet together they amount to a different life entirely.

What It Adds Up To

The before-and-after of moving into an Optima community is not really about square footage or finishes but about how much of a life gets spent on living, once the systems and people and spaces around you start doing their part. Residents come for the architecture, and they stay because the building, the team, and the daily experience of being there continue to give back long after the novelty of any single amenity has settled into routine.

Explore our communities and discover what the quiet promise of Optima feels like from the inside.