In April the management company for Loft-Right, a massive glass-and-steel residence at 1237 W. Fullerton, threw a party. Outside, prospective tenants stood behind a velvet rope, taking care of business on their cell phones as they waited to be admitted to the cavernous, curving lobby, where a DJ was spinning hip-hop. A flat-screen TV showed videos and flashed logos for ESPN, Bliss, and Kiehl’s. Someone handed out goodie bags filled with CDs and cosmetics while partygoers signed up to win prizes like an iPod or a trip for two to Vegas.
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“Do they know this is a famous, iconic design? No, but they realize it’s nice,” says Robert Bronstein, president of the Scion Group, which helped conceive and publicize the project and manages the building. Though he acknowledges that there may be a few battered fixtures come next spring, he’s optimistic. “People tend to treat spaces in correlation to how nice they are,” he says. “We have faith in the students.”
But Bronstein isn’t going by faith alone: every element of Loft-Right has been intensively researched and/or focus-grouped. Benches are set inside recesses past every few rooms, which are intended both to break up lengthy corridors (the building is a block long) and facilitate mingling. The hallways are done up in bright colors and patterns that change every hundred feet or so. “This building is like a canvas,” Bronstein says. “We can toss out the color scheme every five years.”
Bronstein also argues that schools like DePaul have to live up to students’ expectations of urban living. “They watch The Real World and Friends–they have this idealized version of living in the city,” he says. To that end, Loft-Right is something between a dorm room and an apartment: all utilities except electricity are covered, there’s free parking and a 24-hour door staff, and residents aren’t responsible for their roommates’ share of the rent. The building is owned by a university-affiliated nonprofit, which financed construction by selling $73.4 million in tax-exempt bonds, and it pays Scion a fee to run the place. Supervision is limited to a group of “community advisers,” basically RAs who, as Bronstein puts it, are “a bit more customer-service oriented.” Loft-Right isn’t official DePaul housing, but tenants sign an agreement to follow the building’s policies and procedures, which are similar to the university’s code of conduct.
For other students the decision was a no-brainer. As a freshman, Charlie McGrath was so eager to escape the dorms he moved off campus, where he says he was one of three people using a bedroom that comfortably fit two. So he was immediately interested when he saw an ad for Loft-Right last winter. “It really looked like the nicest housing option in Lincoln Park we could find, and it’s fairly cheap for what we got.” He and a friend signed a contract after touring the building. They moved in two weeks ago.
