Some businesses have been uniquely positioned to thrive during the coronavirus pandemic, including pharmacies, grocery stores — and Sybaris.
You might say every day has been like Valentine’s Day — a perennial sellout — for the members-only pool suite concept that caters to couples only.
While hotels have suffered from steep occupancy drops throughout the nearly two-year health crisis, Sybaris experienced a 12% increase in occupancy last year compared with 2018, said Dan Fahrner, Sybaris’ marketing director for 25 years.
“We have experienced an unprecedented level of increased business. It’s been absolutely crazy,” Fahrner said. “We have been fully occupied almost every night for the last two years. When COVID hit our business suffered like most others, but as time passed, people started to experience ‘cabin fever’ and Sybaris offered a very safe escape.”
Sybaris, with its intense focus on privacy, is not your typical escape. Only two adults age 18 and older are allowed inside each suite per booking, and must pay a membership fee in order to book. Guests check in at an office on site, but will rarely see anyone else during their stay. There are no hallways, elevators, gyms, common areas or restaurants at Sybaris. No children, pets, guests or parties are allowed.
The company, which since the 1970s has catered to couples in the Chicago area looking for a romantic getaway, was also obsessive about sanitation before the COVID-19 pandemic made cleanliness a top concern for travelers.
The pools and suites undergo multiple rounds of cleaning, filtration and inspection. Linens and bedspreads are fresh for each new couple. All areas are disinfected between guest visits.
“Everything has to be spotless clean because if it isn’t, you’re not going to have a romantic experience. Then you’re not going to have a great time, right?” said Natalie Rivera, assistant director of operations, who started her career at Sybaris as a housekeeper 35 years ago. “And so we’ve just obsessed about that forever.”
If you were a kid growing up in the Chicago area during the 1980s or 1990s, you probably begged your parents to take you to Sybaris after watching its G-rated TV commercials featuring bubbling spas and splashy swimming pools with slides and waterfalls.
Now, the company relies heavily on social media, allowing it to attract visitors from beyond its traditional 25-mile radius of Chicago. Fahrner says Sybaris has more than 300,000 likes on Facebook and almost 34,000 followers on Instagram. Several recent visitors have posted videos of their Sybaris rooms and features on TikTok — with one garnering more than 10 million views.
It’s the type of exposure — excuse the pun — Sybaris never expected to receive for free. Now, guests from around the country are booking multiple night stays. As a result of the increased business, Sybaris opened a call center in its Arlington Heights office last year and is hiring representatives to answer questions about its properties and make reservations.
It’s a level of growth that would no doubt make its founder proud.
A lover and a fighter
Kenneth C. Knudson Jr.’s hardscrabble upbringing is the stuff of a blue-collar Midwestern fairy tale.
Born Feb. 13, 1945, and raised in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, he launched his first business — a lemonade stand — at age 8. Knudson’s early career aspirations, like his name, mirrored his father’s. He, too, became a toolmaker at International Harvester.
“In our neighborhood, you either worked for International Harvester or the Chicago and North Western railroad,” Knudson told the Tribune in 1992. “Further education was a wistful aspiration.”
A desire to pursue self-defense emerged early in his life — possibly as a result of the family’s home on North Central Avenue being vandalized with a paint-filled container “bomb” in 1952. It was one of at least three homes of nonstriking International Harvester workers targeted at the time, the Tribune reported.
A laborer’s career seemed to be Knudson’s destiny until his father died in 1963.
“You always tried to live up to fathers back then. I was part of the changing guard. In essence, when my father died (when Knudson was 18), it released me,” he said.
Though married with a child by age 20, Knudson’s pursuits involved speed and adrenaline. He traded a motorized bicycle from his preteen years to race rocket-powered cars, suffering a compound fracture of his left shoulder when his engine exploded during a race at Great Lakes Dragaway in 1965.
That same year, Knudson began taking martial arts lessons and would eventually become a ninth-degree black belt. He trained with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris — who hurled Knudson across a pool table in the 1985 movie “Code of Silence.” He defeated martial arts titans Joe Lewis and Bill Wallace, who was actor John Belushi’s instructor. In 2003, Martial Arts Magazine said Knudson, who won more than 100 championship titles in karate, “was a real nightmare for his opponents. One was not going to survive a fight with Knudson without getting hurt.”
In 1967, Knudson opened his own martial arts studio on Grand Avenue, Academy of Judo & Karate. Nine more would follow under the name Olympic Karate Studios. He hosted free self-defense courses for public schoolteachers and participated in karate demonstrations before action movies at the Oriental Theatre. When he couldn’t easily import karate gear to sell to his students, he bought a garment factory to produce them locally. He also sold an at-home audio karate instructional kit known as the Circle System of Self Defense.
He met some of his closest friends and business associates through this work — including future Sybaris President Rande Repke — and his second wife, Charlene Farrell.
“The thrill of the business was being able to be the first ... being on the cutting edge of new fields,” Knudson told the Tribune in 1992. “I lived it, loved it. It didn’t matter if you’re richer or smarter than I was. Everyone started at the same level, and my instinct, more unorthodox, gave me a winning edge. We carved karate’s new frontier.”
He sold it all after a bedroom set at the newly opened Woodfield Mall inspired him to create Sybaris.
Repke worked with Knudson to find property for the first location. He remembers Knudson picking up a phone book and calling small motels around the Chicago area to see if any were interested in selling.
“We got down to Downers Grove and bingo — somebody wanted to get out of the business. It was called the Ogden Hotel on Ogden Avenue. It was a small, 12-unit motel and he ended up working out a good deal for both parties,” Repke said.
The former “mom and pop operation” had 250-square-foot cottages, and the duo decided to renovate just two of them with whirlpool tubs and other luxurious furnishings to see if there was a market for it, Repke said. The separated accommodations unknowingly would become a Sybaris mainstay since “nobody’s hitting the wall next to you,” he said.
Repke says the name was suggested by a business associate. Sybaris, an ancient Greek city in southern Italy, was known for the wealth and luxury of its inhabitants, according to Britannica.
“And it started up very slowly. Nobody was renting the rooms and we were wondering why. We were both kind of naive at the time. I was fresh out of college, not much business experience,” Repke said.
They later realized, Repke said, neither knew how to advertise the rooms. Thankfully, stories about the project started to pull curious visitors to the property — including a writer for Cosmopolitan magazine. Her 1982 story proclaimed “What one night at the Sybaris does to regenerate romance … well, it’s enough to make passports passé.”
Never a dull moment
Decades ago, visitors to a Sybaris suite were welcomed by carpet-covered walls, a king-size water bed, flickering fireplace, giant projections of secluded tropical beaches, a selection of adult-themed videos (which a 1985 Tribune story referred to as “what, in a family newspaper, can only be called training films”) and a hanging chair apparatus nicknamed the Taiwan basket, which Knudson patented.
A 1990 Tribune article referred to Knudson as “the Conrad Hilton of hedonism and the Colonel Sanders of spicy marriage” with hopes to build the “franchising of romancing.”
Orland Park flat out refused to allow Sybaris to open there.
“You have to go through hard times,” Knudson told the Tribune in 1990. “Just now, we’re earning the respect of the business and financial community. Just now, we’re mature enough to go forward.”
Farrell, chief operating officer and Knudson’s wife, said she and Knudson attended seminars with motivational speakers and brought back ideas to share with their colleagues from their visits to hotels. She says the workaholic couple motivated each other.
“And as dynamic as he was, it was hard to keep up with him,” she said. “He always said, ‘I handle the big picture and you handle the details.’ So, what would happen is he starts something, then I would be working on the details of it. And then he’d be off starting something else. It was hard to keep up with, but it was never a dull moment.”
Renovations are underway at the Frankfort and Indianapolis Sybaris locations under the supervision of Fernando Murguia, director of quality assurance. Valentine’s Day marks his 25th year with the company. He started visiting Sybaris in high school while his mother worked shifts as housekeeping manager.
“When I was 20, I was put in charge of the Frankfort location. And then I became the front desk manager. And then when I was 25, I was made general manager of the Frankfort location,” he said.
Murguia said the opportunity to work with Knudson, who he considered a mentor, and the ability to grow professionally has kept him with Sybaris. It was his idea to launch a call center.
“I’ve been with Sybaris since I was 18 years old. I started out as a kid, and I was just super ambitious and I wanted to learn how to do everything,” Rivera said.
Knudson’s dream was to expand the Sybaris brand to 50 cities in the United States and Canada. But he and three others died in a small plane crash near Chicago Executive Airport in 2006.
Employees speak about Knudson as if he were still present on the Sybaris properties, slipping them $2 bills upon observing their good work. His wife hopes he would be proud of the work they’ve continued in his absence.
“I just can’t say enough good things about Ken and only wish he could be here and, also, this would be everything that he envisioned,” Farrell said.
