Granite City Brewery, hotel to neighbor Woodfield

Construction will begin this summer on a Granite City Food and Brewery restaurant and Hampton Inn and Suites hotel that will open side-by-side next year just west of Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.

The paired-up developments will take over the former site of American Hardware, 801 Plaza Drive, which will be demolished soon.

The joint proposal by the Minneapolis-based restaurant chain and hotel developer is unusual, Schaumburg Economic Development Manager Matt Frank said. Granite City Food and Brewery is seeking a stronger presence in the Chicago area, and this particular partnership is not occurring everywhere, he added.

Frank described Granite City as a high-end restaurant that brews its own beer on-site. The company runs 30 restaurants in 13 states, with the only other Illinois locations being in Rockford, Orland Park and East Peoria.

The Schaumburg restaurant will be 10,802-square-feet and have a 1,195-square-foot patio at its southwest corner, surrounded by a 4-foot-tall fence to separate the patio from the drive aisle.

The Hampton Inn and Suites will be a four-story, 64,294-square-foot building with 101 rooms, an indoor pool and meeting space. Schaumburg trustees this week approved a height variance allowing the 54.5-foot-tall hotel to exceed the normal 50-foot maximum building height in its zoning district.

Both the hotel and restaurant will occupy their own subdivided lots on the site formerly used exclusively by American Hardware. A separate third lot will contain a detention basin for water runoff from both businesses.

Though some other previously approved hotel developments in Schaumburg have been stalled since the recession, Frank said developers of the Hampton Inn and Suites have all their funding secured and are ready to start.