Property Sold For Planned Third Ward Hotel
Move comes as construction plows ahead on Deer District hotel.
Restoration Hardware, 224 E. Chicago St. Photo taken by Jeramey Jannene on May 13th, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
NCG Hospitality has taken another major step toward developing a hotel in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward.
An affiliate of the Middleton-based hotel developer acquired the building at 224 E. Chicago St. for $7 million, according to a sale recorded Sept. 16 in Wisconsin real estate transfer records.
The three-story building is slated for conversion into a 134-room upscale boutique hotel.
NCG purchased the property from an affiliate of the ownership group behind Rubin’s Furniture, which operated a store in the building for more than two decades.
The transaction comes approximately 14 months after NCG first unveiled its redevelopment plans and shortly after the company started construction on another Milwaukee hotel.
NCG held a ceremonial groundbreaking in August for a $50 million, 156-room AC Hotel by Marriott at 430 W. State St. in Deer District. That hotel, being developed on a portion of the former Bradley Center site, is expected to open in late 2027.
At the groundbreaking, NCG chief development officer Andy Inman told Urban Milwaukee that the Third Ward project did not yet have a firm construction date, but would follow the Deer District development.
“We’ll get this one out of the ground, and then that will be our next construction start,” he said in August.
The Third Ward project was originally proposed in July 2025 as an AC Hotel by Marriott, but NCG shuffled the brands for its two pending Milwaukee hotels earlier this year.
The company upgraded the Deer District proposal, previously planned as a Moxy hotel, to the AC brand in March. With that change, NCG said the Third Ward property would instead become an “upscale boutique hotel.”
NCG operates a similar independently flagged property in Madison, The Saddlery, a 46-room boutique hotel focused on extended stays. That project also involved the redevelopment of a former Rubin’s Furniture property and was NCG’s first completed adaptive reuse project.
Robert Rubin, part of the Rubin’s ownership group, brought the Third Ward project to NCG after the companies worked together on the Madison development.
The company secured approval for the hotel design from the Historic Third Ward Architectural Review Board in September 2025.
A significant portion of the planned redevelopment involves working around the unusual dimensions of the former factory.
The deep building has a large floor plate with limited access to natural light. NCG plans to remove portions of the building’s interior floors to create a large atrium, allowing natural light into guest rooms positioned around the center of the structure. Existing rooftop skylights would be incorporated into the atrium.
Another significant change is planned along E. Chicago Street.
The building’s first floor sits approximately six feet above the sidewalk. NCG plans to remove an existing ramp leading into the basement and create a new street-level hotel entrance. Guests would then use stairs or a ramp to reach the existing first floor.
Plans approved by the Third Ward review board also call for a recessed porch along Chicago Street. First-floor windows would be designed to swing open, creating an indoor-outdoor space for the hotel’s restaurant and bar.
The basement is expected to accommodate approximately 40 vehicles for valet parking, with additional public parking available across Chicago Street.
NCG intends to use state and federal historic preservation tax credits for the redevelopment, requiring the project to comply with historic preservation standards.
Built for Monarch Manufacturing Co. in 1915, the approximately 86,700-square-foot building was once used to produce leather jackets for the U.S. Air Force.
Rubin’s Furniture operated there from 1993 until 2015. RH, formerly Restoration Hardware, subsequently opened a 27,000-square-foot store on the first floor. The upscale retailer closed its only Wisconsin location in March, but is planning a new store in Brookfield.
The building’s upper floors have been used as office space, though much of the property has been vacant in recent years. Cramer-Krasselt, the largest office tenant, is moving to 117 N. Jefferson St.
The hotel would be NCG’s third major Milwaukee hotel investment.
In 2023, the company opened The Trade, a 207-room Marriott Autograph Collection hotel at 420 W. Juneau Ave., immediately north of Fiserv Forum. Its Deer District AC Hotel is now under construction one block south of the arena.
The Third Ward project would be only the neighborhood’s second hotel, joining the 158-room Kimpton Journeyman Hotel.
The Washington, D.C., studio of architecture firm Cooper Carry is leading the design.
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