A place to stay that looks and feels like the Urban Collective Boutique Hotel is something novel in southwest Illinois, where a new wave of regeneration is being powered by cool, creative, locally owned businesses. And, reinventing a loved local landmark, this women-owned cutie is a star of the show.
When you’re touring the characterful small towns around southwest Illinois’ stretch of the mythical Route 66, our tip for a home base is Edwardsville, with its cute, red-brick Main Street storefronts, charming leafy suburbs and aspirational college-town vibes courtesy of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. It feels like this upbeat, well-kept little city is at the forefront of the broader regeneration that’s visibly revitalising many of the nearby communities, and the new-in-2023 Urban Collective Boutique Hotel is a symptom of some solid – and proudly female-owned – tastemaker credentials.
“We believe that downtown Edwardsville has much to offer travellers, and feel that a boutique hotel has been a missing piece”, say owners Hannah Fink and Kristen Pfund. They found their dream site in 2021 in the handsome, 1887 Federal-style McCorkle Building, when its previous owner Buhrmester Paint and Wallpaper Company decided to wind up the business after more than 85 years as a well-loved local landmark. “We eagerly embraced the opportunity to restore and update such a beautiful piece of Edwardsville history”, Hannah and Kristen continue of the painstaking renovation that has given the building a forward-looking new lease of life.
Just a block from Main Street, and closer still to plentiful free parking, the hotel is run as a ‘contactless’ concept, with no conventional front-desk services, and offers a collection of eight large and individually decorated studio apartments for between two and four guests. Two of these are ADA-compliant (adapted for guests with disabilities), and the whole building is lift-served. Moody boudoir your vibe? Go for the raspberry-pink Inkwell suite. In the market for some funky-ass 1970s flair? Check out Vintage Vibes. Soothing country-club hues more your lane? Plump for the preppy Ivy League.
| Perfect for | Fly into | Right on time |
| The Sophisticate | ORD | GMT -6 |
| While you’re Out There |
| Wrapped in 360-degree views across wooded parkland and lush, grassy Mississippi River plains to the striking city skyline of St. Louis in neighbouring Missouri, the UNESCO-listed Cahokia Mounds World Heritage and State Historic Site is a group of monumental earthworks that mark the largest pre-Colombian site north of Mexico. At its peak in around 1100, this ancient metropolis had about 20,000 citizens – more than London at that time. The site is atmospheric and mysterious to explore, and it is an intriguing way to start to learn about the area’s Native American History. |
We chose the high-ceilinged, New-York-warehouse-referencing Downtown Loft Suite, and loved the exposed red-brick walls, large sash windows looking out onto the imposing Madison County Courthouse and wood-floored living space plenty big enough for a two-man yoga session (that said, that exercise took place at all, given the generous ice bucket of bubbles, beers and hard seltzers that awaited our arrival, is a minor miracle). The bathroom is large, as is the well-lit vanity area with mirrors big enough to simultaneously service three Drag Race contestants, and had we pulled out the sofa bed and shared with two more friends, we’d still have had plenty of space (and still not got through all that hooch).
The hotel’s downtown location places guests ideally for checking out the new generation of accessible gourmet dining, craft brewing and artisanal distilling that’s growing in the area and Illinois on the whole, with lots of venues and outlets within easy walking distance. We didn’t get to sample all the places we’d heard praised, but can highly recommend the combo platters at Wasabi Sushi Bar, Wagyu burgers by Sneaky’s Bar and Burger Joint, and the near-addictive breakfast burritos at button-cute Café Birdie (whose lovely owner Jenny couldn’t have been prouder to tell us that more than half her team are of the LGBTQ+ community). And to drink in a bit of local hospitality history, there’s Stagger Inn Again, the city’s oldest continuously running bar and a friendly, frills-free hub where visitors and locals mingle (sometimes with a little gee-tar entertainment). When it’s time for bed, that one block away from Main Street makes all the difference – although we’re light sleepers, we didn’t hear a peep of street noise all night.
Urban Collective Boutique Hotel’s owners Hannah and Kristen also run the smart next-door bar and event venue The Ink House (for which they left us a welcome drinks voucher – nice touch), which they’ve renovated in a similarly dapper fashion. Seems there’s a stylish, two-woman design revolution afoot in this town.
Photography courtesy of Urban Collective Boutique Hotel
