Optima Signature, the mixed-use development at 220 East Illinois St. in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, will add an elementary school this fall. The Guidepost Montessori at Magnificent Mile school will lease 14K SF in the building, its last available retail space, and plans to serve first through fifth grades.
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For parents and tutors looking for space outside their home for student e-learning, a 57-story rental high-rise in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood is offering a creative solution. Optima Signature has made a recent pivot due to the pandemic and started marketing its office suites for student learning pods.
The business suites are furnished with five to seven workstations, a mini-fridge, built-in cabinetry and window treatments. The space comes with Wi-Fi, is professionally cleaned and provides access to a curated selection of building amenities, such as outdoor lounge areas for al fresco studying. Plus, the suites are available to anyone, not just residents of Optima Signature.
Designed by award-winning architect David Hovey Sr., Optima Signature is a 490-unit, Class A tower at 220 E. Illinois Street. The mixed-use property was developed by Optima, Inc. and completed in 2017. Located on the building’s second and seventh floors, the study suites are available for $1,800 to $2,400 per month.
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Optima will lead property management and leasing services at its 490-unit Optima Signature mixed-use development in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, the under-construction 198-unit Optima Lakeview in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood and its upcoming 109-unit building in downtown Wilmette along Chicago’s North Shore. While Optima has served as the owner, architect, developer and general contractor for its properties in Chicago and Arizona for more than 40 years, the firm had also assumed property management services at its Scottsdale, Arizona, rental communities, which contain more than 1,000 units.
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Proximity to good schools has long been a top consideration for house hunters.
Nationally, homes near top schools cost nearly 80% more on average, according to a recent Realtor.com report, and in the Midwest, 93% more.
Given that one-third of renters have school-age children living in the home, according to National Multifamily Housing Council, it makes sense that the rental sector is paying close attention to what kind of offerings appeal to families.
The good news for parents who currently rent — whether they’re waiting for home prices to fall, more housing inventory to hit the market, or because they need or prefer to rent — a number of rental communities throughout the Chicago area offer excellent proximity to great schools and on-site amenities that made the grade.
Take Home at Ashcroft, a new build-to-rent community with attached houses by Lynd in Oswego. Located next to Traughber Junior High school, a public school in Oswego Community Unit District 308 serving grades six to eight, Home at Ashcroft makes it easy for parents and students to get to class even on the busiest mornings.
Besides being close to schools, Ashcroft also offers other family-friendly benefits, including larger, three-bedroom floor plans, many with basements that can be finished as playrooms or homework rooms, two-car attached private garages to store bikes and sports equipment, and private fenced yards.
And, set to open later this year, Ashcroft’s $2 million clubhouse will include amenities intended for the enjoyment of adults and children. For example, an on-site fitness center and outdoor swimming pool will provide ample ways for kids to burn off energy or train for school sports. What’s more, the resident lounge and business center will offer pleasant spots to study, either independently or with groups, and make an ideal spot to host birthday parties, graduation celebrations and other events.
In nearby Naperville, The Ponds of Naperville, a 216-unit rental community managed by Marquette Management, provides another convenient rental option for parents with school-aged children. Its location, one of the community’s biggest draws, is less than 1 mile from Elmwood Elementary School and a short drive from the city’s many highly ranked private and public elementary, middle and high schools.
The many kid-friendly features within the Ponds community enhance family life, including a swimming pool and sundeck, and a picnic area with hammocks. The clubhouse not only serves as an extension of residents’ homes with space to host larger groups, including a kitchen and a billiards table, but also offers additional places to study, meet with a tutor or spread out to work on school projects.
Naturally, in the denser city neighborhoods, more people live within walking distance of a school or schools, but some communities are more convenient than others. For example, Guidepost Montessori at Magnificent Mile occupies the lower level of Optima Signature, a 57-story, 490-unit Certified LEED Silver luxury rental high-rise with large three-bedroom apartments designed, developed, built and managed by Optima, Inc. in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood.
The school, which opened in 2019 and more than doubled its footprint in 2020 due to demand from area residents, offers high-quality education for infants, toddlers, preschool, kindergarten and elementary-aged children, with Spanish immersion options available. For young residents of the building enrolled at Guidepost, class is only an elevator ride away.
Optima Signature also cleverly adapted its on-site business suites into academic e-learning pods, or group study-from-home areas, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and continues to offer them as optional learning pods today. Providing parents and tutors with much-needed study space outside their homes, the suites each include five to seven workstations, Wi-Fi and a professional cleaning service.
Additionally, Optima Signature boasts a wide range of kid- and family-friendly activities and amenities, such as resort-style indoor and outdoor heated swimming pools; a dog park; dedicated indoor and outdoor children’s play areas; and basketball, squash and bocce courts.
And while it may not have a school located inside its building, 1000 South Clark, a 469-unit luxury rental community in downtown Chicago managed by RMK Management, is about a 3-minute drive or 10-minute walk to the British International School of Chicago, South Loop.
The community’s spacious apartments and rental townhouses, which offer more than 2,500 square feet, are a draw for families looking to enroll in the school. Offering a personalized learning approach, the private school is open to students from ages 3 to 18. It’s one of several schools and higher learning institutions located in the neighborhood, including Village Leadership Academy, South Loop Elementary School, South Loop Montessori School and Jones College Prep.
In addition to its proximity to a number of great schools, 1000 South Clark also offers a host of on-site amenities ideal for families and children — including a full-size indoor basketball court, outdoor activity courtyards, an indoor/outdoor pool, a large outdoor running track and a new indoor pickleball court.
And, for those days when school isn’t in session, the building is only about a 10-minute drive or 25-minute walk from Chicago’s famed Museum Campus, as well as Grant Park and Millennium Park, which makes the community a great option for families looking to rent in the city near a wide range of kid-friendly activities.
While not everyone needs or wants to buy a house, a growing number of communities like these are making it possible to find rental homes close to high-quality schools and with amenities that make the grade, whether kids are looking to study or play.
• Emily Johnson is president of Taylor Johnson, a Chicago-based public relations firm for the real estate industry.
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The Guidepost Montessori at Magnificent Mile school is more than doubling in size to accommodate the addition of an elementary school at Optima Signature, a mixed-use development at 220 E. Illinois Street in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. Optima, Inc., developer of the building, announced the school will lease an additional 14,000 square feet—the building’s last available retail space—with plans to open this fall to serve first through fifth grades.
“Since the school’s opening just over a year ago, many of the families living at Optima Signature—or who live or work in the surrounding neighborhood—have embraced the school’s convenience factor and its quality Montessori early childhood education program,” said David Hovey Sr., CEO of Optima, Inc. “Whether you want to grab breakfast or lunch, take your pet in for a check-up or you’re in need of an elementary school, the retail line-up at Optima Signature is dynamic and truly fills a niche in the growing Streeterville neighborhood to make the building a destination for people in the area.”
This is the property’s second commercial leasing announcement in as many months, following the lease-up of all 22 furnished office suites at Optima Signature. In addition to Guidepost Montessori, retail tenants include Egg Harbor Café, a restaurant specializing in breakfast, brunch and lunch; GoodVets Streeterville, a full-service veterinarian redefining pet care; RUNAWAY fitness, a run conditioning fitness studio and Bedazzled Nails & Spa.
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A 57-story apartment tower in the Streeterville neighborhood plans to convert some of its office space to small classrooms, betting that frazzled families will seek space outside the home to conduct remote learning amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The 490-unit Optima Signature, a skyscraper at 220 E. Illinois St. known for its bright red lower levels, is no ordinary schoolhouse.
Yet with many parents working from home since March 2019 amid COVID-19, and with many schools planning to conduct classes virtually this fall, the building’s owner believes there will be a demand for learning pods. So-called “pandemic pods” and “micro-schools” allow small groups of kids from close-knit families to study together in person with a teacher, tutor or parent.
Widespread closures of schools and day cares has left Chicago-area workers and employers scrambling for solutions.
Glencoe-based architecture and development firm Optima, which completed the Streeterville high-rise in 2017, in August 2020 began marketing four of its 25 office suites for educational purposes.
In an area of the city known for high-rises and lacking homes with yards, Optima believes parents are feeling the stress of homes also serving as offices and classrooms.
“For people who are living in the downtown environment, where they might be sharing a smaller space with two working parents and kids, those spaces can get small and loud and distracting,” Optima Marketing Director Ali Burnham said. “Here, you’re not fighting for space.
“We suspected there would be a need with schools going remote and families forming these pods.”
Optima expects interest to come from the immediate area, including from parents who typically send their kids to the Montessori school in the tower, Burnham said.
Optima Signature’s furnished suites typically are used as co-working spaces by Optima Signature residents and other nearby workers and businesses. All but four of the suites are now leased, on six-month and one-year contracts, Burnham said.
The suites are on the second and seventh floors of the tower and range from five to seven desks.
The spaces, or those in other co-working facilities, won’t be affordable for many families. They cost US$1,800 to US$2,400 per month.
Optima is offering space only and the firm is not providing teachers or tutors to conduct classes.
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Development firm Optima, Inc. will lead property management and leasing services at three Chicagoland Class A rental buildings – its 490-unit Optima Signature mixed-use development in downtown Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood, the under-construction 198-unit Optima Lakeview in the North Side’s Lakeview neighborhood, and its upcoming 109-unit building in downtown Wilmette, IL, along the North Shore.
While Optima has served as the owner, architect, developer and general contractor for its properties in Chicago and Arizona for more than 40 years, the firm primarily focused its property management services at its Scottsdale, AZ rental communities.
“As we expand our portfolio in the Chicago area with two new luxury apartments in development, it is a natural progression to bring management in-house, enabling us to provide the same level of exceptional service we’ve perfected at our Arizona communities,” said David Hovey Jr., AIA, president and COO of Optima, Inc.
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On a sunny winter day, residents of Optima Kierland are pursuing their morning rituals—walking the dog, working out in the fitness room, running on a track around the rooftop pool, powering up a Zoom call in the lounge, heading to the underground garage for the commute to work. But the 1,000-unit condo and rental complex, spread across five towers, is not your typical brown-box-and-a-balcony multifamily project so prevalent around the Valley. Instead, it is a sustainable, architectural tour-de-force, balancing concrete and glass, shade and sunlight, voids and cubic forms, all cooled with lush plantings that defy boundaries between outside and in.
The project is one of the latest achievements by father-and-son architects David Hovey Sr. and David Hovey Jr., who, along with other family members, run Optima, headquartered in Scottsdale and Chicago. Known for their edgy, architecturally striking designs of multifamily complexes and innovative construction techniques and materials, the Hoveys—and their company—have found the secret sauce to success. Optima is a soup-to-nuts company that develops, designs, builds and manages projects, overseeing everything from site selection to specifying kitchen sink faucets.
“I’ve been a fan of the Hoveys’ architecture for a long time,” says architect Anthony Floyd, who heads Scottsdale’s green building program and has worked with the Hoveys on sustainability strategies for several of their projects. “They’ve changed how we view multifamily housing here. What they create is unlike what we’ve seen in Arizona—or even the world.”
The history of this modernist dynasty began with Hovey Sr. Born in New Zealand to a Kiwi mother and a U.S. Marine father, he moved with his family to Chicago when he was 15 years old. “Chicago is the foremost city in the world for modern architecture,” Hovey Sr. says. “Being there sparked my interest in architecture.”
Hovey Sr. enrolled in the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Mies van der Rohe had served as dean and shaped the school’s modernist bent. “Mies was no longer at IIT when I studied there,” he remembers, “but some of us went to his house one night and didn’t leave until 4 a.m. He lived in an old brick apartment—not one of his designs—because he didn’t want to be constantly accosted by clients.”
During college, Hovey Sr. worked as an assistant to the curator of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, igniting his love of modern art and inspiring his later work in metal sculpture. His first job out of school was with a small firm, but, wanting to experience a larger office, Hovey Sr. signed on with noted Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, working there for four years during the 1970s.
“My son and I are contemporary architects. We are interested in the design, materials and technologies of the 21st century. We’re not interested in allusions to the past.”
David Hovey Sr., FAIA, architect
But there was always an itch to do his own thing. “My IIT professor, Arthur Takeuchi, always said that an architect was the low man on the totem pole when it came to projects,” Hovey Sr. recalls. “He said the best outcome was to be not only the designer but also the developer and client.”
Heeding those words, Hovey Sr. launched Optima in suburban Chicago in 1978, along with his wife, Eileen Sheehan Hovey, who handled the real estate component of their projects. Before long, they were specializing in design-driven multifamily complexes around the city and, later, joined by their children, Tara Hovey, who handles financial strategies for the company, and David Jr., who earned his master’s in architecture at his father’s alma mater and now serves as CEO.
Frequent winter visitors to Scottsdale, the family opened a second Optima office in the desert in the early 2000s, sensing a market that was open to innovative modernist housing. By then, Hovey Jr. was helping push forward Optima’s shape-shifting experimentations with design, materials and construction methods. “When I was working as a construction superintendent on our job sites,” says Hovey Jr., “I observed inefficiencies between architecture and construction that could be improved by prefabrication.”
Though they became known for apartments and condos, the father and son have long experimented with techniques and approaches by building single-family spec homes, completing several over the years in North Scottsdale. “We had to find a new language for architecture here in Arizona,” Hovey Sr. says. “Studying Frank Lloyd Wright’s shelters, we learned to design optimum structures in the desert, ones that celebrated the indoor-outdoor relationship and incorporated sustainable features, such as solar power and passive cooling. We took what we learned from these spec homes and translated that into our multifamily work.”
After completing their first Arizona project, the Biltmore Optima, the Hoveys wanted to include landscaped roofs and terraces for the next site, Optima Camelview. Hovey Jr. worked with ASU to study desert plants in terrace- and rooflike beds at a site in Glendale. “We looked at about 150 kinds of plants and trees,” Hovey Jr. notes. “We learned which survived in extreme sun or shaded spots and which didn’t.”
Optima Camelview, a condominium project, won accolades and awards for its—literal—green design of lushly landscaped terraces, as well as other sustainable strategies, such as shaded glass walls, underground parking and public open space. Optima Sonoran Village, rental apartments in downtown Scottsdale, followed, expanding on the design theme, as did the recently completed Optima Kierland. Under construction now is Optima McDowell Mountain, which will be a six-tower development of rental apartments and condos, mixing in street-level retail and even more amenities and green elements, such as rainwater harvesting, than the previous projects.
As the Hoveys moved forward with projects, they developed relationships with core groups of craftspeople, such as Jerry Barnier, founder of Suntec Concrete. “We started working together about 15 years ago,” says Barnier, “and we found that the Hoveys are very receptive to pushing the design forward efficiently. They understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to construction. They push everyone to do their best work.”
Despite recent pushback about high-density development in some parts of the Valley, the Hoveys are secure in their place in the desert’s urban landscape. “Having density and height on a site allows us to create open space that’s accessible to the public—and not just our building residents,” Hovey Sr. points out. “It also gives us room to have setbacks that are landscaped. Our McDowell Mountain project is planned around a central park open to everyone.”
Always looking for future possibilities, the father and son prefer to concentrate on one or two projects at a time. “Each development we do is a progression, a journey of how we envision people living in the 21st century.”
—David Hovey Sr., architect and Optima founder
Read more on Phoenix Home + Garden
A cornerstone of community design at Optima Inc. is including green space to seamlessly connect residents to nature. Numerous studies suggest that contact to nature has positive effects for human physical and psychological well-being.
At Optima Kierland Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, a development of luxury rental and for-sale residences, residents have access to lush rooftop landscaping, an outdoor Zen garden and 5.5 acres of lushly landscaped courtyards with fountains.
A multiphase development project, each building within Optima Kierland Center is connected to the others through aesthetic structure and physical pathways amid lush gardens. Within the building, an innovative vertical planting system features self-containing irrigation and drainage, including vibrant and colorful planters at the edge of each floor. The system ultimately culminates into a beautiful rooftop garden.
At Optima Sonoran Village in Arizona, 60 percent of its grounds are open space that not only mediate the harsh desert climate but also create visually stunning landscaped areas to be enjoyed by residents and the community. A Kaleidoscope Juice Bar with patio seating is also on site.
In Chicago, luxury rental tower Optima Signature offers residents and the surrounding Streeterville neighborhood access to a tree-lined public plaza near its front entrance with a short walk to the lakefront and the Riverwalk.
Read the full feature on Forbes.
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Optima, Inc. has completed the buildout of Guidepost Montessori at Magnificent Mile’s new elementary school at Optima Signature, the firm’s mixed-use development at 220 E. Illinois Street in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. Completed by Optima’s team in just three months, the new 14,000-square-foot elementary addition, which will serve grades 1 through 6, is now accepting registrations for in-person learning.
“As a vertically integrated firm, Optima was uniquely positioned to exceed construction timelines and deliver a new quality education choice in Streeterville at a time when so many parents need in-person alternatives to traditional schools,” said David Hovey Sr., CEO of Optima, Inc. and architect of Optima Signature.
The on-campus expansion comes on the heels of Optima, Inc. releasing four business suites at Optima Signature earlier this month to be used as pandemic learning pods, for both residents and nonresidents seeking home-based options due to the pandemic. According to Hovey, Guidepost Montessori has offered to work with families who use the pods if they need teachers, educational materials or supplemental learning programs as part of the school’s new Guidepost at Home program.
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