New Room & Board

Room & Board, Minneapolis-based furniture retailer, has agreed to buy 48,000 square feet of the massive downtown Chicago building at Rush and Ohio streets once occupied by DisneyQuest. According to a report in Crain's Chicago Business, it will move its Room & Board and Retrospect stores into the vacant building in February 2004, when its current lease on 49,000 square feet in the Chicago Place mall on Michigan Avenue expires.

The 12-store chain said the new location will give it more visibility and better street access than it has on the fifth, sixth and seventh floors of the vertical shopping mall it now inhabits at 700 N. Michigan Ave.

Room & Board will take up 6000 square feet of the 95,000-square-foot DisneyQuest building's ground level, and occupy the entire second and third floors, a spokesman told Crain's.

“Although it's only a few blocks from our current location, we feel a freestanding building with street exposure will give us more of a presence in the downtown area,” said founder and president John Gabbert.

Major architectural changes to the former DisneyQuest site will allow the furniture retailer to “better communicate our design philosophy to customers,” he added. Room & Board plans to resurface the building's distinct green-glass facade with metal and completely renovate the interior.

With the relocation, Room & Board will move less than a block from the new Bloomingdale's Home Store in the former Medinah Temple at the corner of Ohio Street and Wabash Avenue. That 130,000-square-foot store just opened earlier this month. And Room & Board will leave a gaping hole at Chicago Place, where it leases nearly one-third of the 160,000 square feet not occupied by Saks Fifth Avenue.