The Penthouse

The Penthouse Hyde Park is a wedding and event venue on the top floor of the Piccadilly building in Hyde Park, Chicago. The building dates to the 1920s and once housed the Piccadilly Theatre. The venue has a ballroom with 20 foot arched windows and skyline views, a rooftop terrace and a private VIP suite.

The owners came to us in the summer of 2020, before the venue had opened, for a website that would take event inquiries. We designed and built the first site that fall, redesigned it once the venue had real photography, and kept it updated through 2025.

The site had to sell a space most visitors had never seen. When we started there were architectural renderings and very few photos, so the design, icons and copy had to carry the art deco character of the building on their own.

Every inquiry also had to land in Tripleseat, the event sales platform the venue uses, and the owners wanted a site their own staff could update.

A brand system around the logo

The client chose its logo through a design contest. We built everything else around it: a style guide with a gold, cream and charcoal palette and art deco display type, horizontal and icon-only versions of the logo, a favicon, and a matching business card, letterhead and envelope.

Custom art deco icons and illustrations

Instead of stock icons, we drew gold art deco icons for each event type and for the venue's selling points, plus gold illustrations of the furniture available for events: chiavari chairs, round and rectangle banquet tables, a cake table and high-top tables.

The first site, in 2020

We designed each page in several rounds with the client, then built the site on WordPress with a Divi child theme: home, weddings, galas and events, VIP suite, a history page on the Piccadilly building with credited archive photos, an FAQ with search and expanding answers, and a health and safety page. We also built a reviews page and a filterable vendor directory with its own admin screen, ready for the owners to publish once they had content. The header hides as you scroll down and returns when you scroll up.

Inquiries straight into Tripleseat

The contact page embeds the venue's Tripleseat lead form, styled to match the site, so every tour request and event inquiry goes directly into the sales pipeline.

A careful launch

The site ran on a staging server with a git deployment pipeline to WP Engine and sat behind a password until the owners were ready. It launched in November 2020 with caching and image compression, and three secondary domains redirected to the main address.

A redesign built on real photography

Once the venue was hosting events, we redesigned the site. New navigation groups it into Spaces (ballroom, rooftop terrace, VIP suite), Events (weddings, milestones, galas, corporate) and Details (pricing, capacities, catering, FAQ, about). Each space has a video virtual tour and a photo gallery, the capacities page shows guest counts by event style with sample floor plans, and every photo carries its photographer's credit and alt text. The new site launched in November 2022.

Kept current

Since then we have handled the venue's update requests: new photography, testimonials, pricing, caterers and a trusted vendors page, most recently in 2025.

• A complete brand and website for a venue that had not yet opened, launched in November 2020.
• Every contact form inquiry goes directly into Tripleseat.
• A 2022 redesign with a page for each space and event type, including virtual tours and galleries.
• Five years of updates as the venue's photography, pricing and vendor list changed.