BURN AFTER READING.
I have a confession to make.
I come from a family that does not cry.
We have tear ducts. Presumably. They have simply never been encouraged.
My maiden name is Goro, and the Goros are not what anyone would describe as emotionally demonstrative.
Our family motto growing up was tough as nails, which sounds inspiring until you realize it was primarily deployed the moment a child was visibly injured and hoping an adult might comfort them.
Fall off your bike? Get up, you’re tough as nails. Lose the championship game? Chin up, tough as nails. Sustain an injury that would normally warrant ice, medical attention, or a brief evaluation of whether all limbs remained attached? Walk it off.
The Goros did not coddle.
The Goros barely acknowledged.
We were raised by maniacs, is what I am telling you.
My dad was the leader of these maniacs.
He was born in Chicago, built his fortune in real estate, lost it all during the recession, and then built it all over again. Never cried. Never spiraled. Never gathered the family around to announce that we were entering a difficult season. He just woke up the next morning and went back to work.
Imagine Logan Roy from Succession as a Chicagoan, but with a slightly better relationship with his children and strong opinions about where to get an Italian beef.
That was my dad.
I happened to be the person in the room sitting beside him when his oncologist explained there was nothing more they could do.
As in, this was it.
As in, the kind of conversation the movies usually follow with swelling music, a long embrace, and someone collapsing dramatically against a hospital wall.
My dad walked out of the office, looked at me, and said, “Do you want to stop at Portillo’s on the way home?”
That was the emotional debrief. Terminal diagnosis, chin up, let’s get a chopped salad.
And honestly, it explains nearly everything about me.
Why I can receive genuinely alarming information and immediately begin making a list. Why my natural response to a crisis is not “How does this make everyone feel?” but “Okay, who has a Shop-Vac?” Why, when water started pouring through the ceiling of The Workshoppe three days before our soft opening, I did not interpret it as a sign from God to stop. I interpreted it as a scheduling issue. (More on the ceiling later. It’s a whole thing.)
This is the Goro family gift. We are extremely difficult to kill and somewhat uncomfortable to hug.
Then I married KC.
KC comes from a family that cries. Kind of a lot, if you ask me.
They cry during speeches. They cry at family dinners. They cry while telling stories about other times they cried. Sometimes no one has died or even received moderately disappointing news... they are simply moved.
They hug one another voluntarily. They say loving things out loud without first being diagnosed with something. When I joined the family, every time someone became emotional I assumed there had been an emergency. No. Someone had given a nice toast.
To this day, whenever anyone in KC’s family starts tearing up around a dinner table, my nervous system quietly asks whether we should call someone.
But this is exactly why KC and I work.
I am the gas; KC is the brakes.
I am the Swedish ice queen who regards every obstacle as a mild administrative inconvenience, and KC is the warmth, the patience, the person who would like us to acknowledge that a significant life event is occurring before I open Monday.com and assign everyone a task.
I say, “We should sign the lease.” KC says, “Should we perhaps review the financial implications?”
I say, “I did. They were upsetting.”
And then, usually, we do it anyway.
Which brings me to my confession.
There is a chance I may cry at the Grand Opening of The Workshoppe this Thursday.
I know. Disturbing. Please burn this email immediately after reading.
I have made it through childbirth, business ownership, construction projects, the collapse of the real estate market, the death of my father, and three small children asking me for snacks at the exact same time.
But apparently several hundred people RSVP’ing to see the thing KC and I built might be what finally takes me down.
Because The Workshoppe is not just a store we are opening. It is the physical version of a belief we have been betting our careers, our money, our time, and occasionally our sanity on for years.
And I need you to understand how insane the bet actually was: we signed a lease on a building we do not own, and then we invested nearly $300,000 transforming it.
Again... a building we do not own. Very passive. Very conservative. Extremely normal financial behavior.
The original space was basically a little green box. A very sad, very oddly shaped green box. With strange flooring and, if I may be so bold, completely grotesque soffits.
We reimagined every inch. Cabinetry displays designed by our own team and built to our specifications, plus the stone, lighting, plaster, hardware, wallpaper, paint, and plumbing we actually use in our projects.
All meant to show you what’s possible.
All built while our own house waited... a historic 1898 Benjamin Marshall home that needs approximately everything, and that everyone keeps asking when we’ll finally renovate. Later, apparently.
We spent the renovation money building a place where other people could work on theirs instead.
Deeply generous, or a severe lapse in judgment. Time will tell.
But we built it because we kept watching smart, capable homeowners get sent into an impossible process. One place for cabinetry. Another for stone. Another for plumbing. Five thousand lighting options. Seventeen open browser tabs. A handful of samples that looked beautiful alone and vaguely hostile the moment you set them side by side.
The problem was never that people lacked taste. They lacked a place where all the decisions could be considered together.
So we built one.
A place where you can see the cabinetry, stone, lighting, hardware, wallpaper, and paint together, in context, and in the right order, before you commit to any of it.
Where nobody points you at a wall of 300 cabinet doors and asks whether you’re “more of a Shaker person.” (Um, I don’t know, Bob. I came here hoping you could tell me.)
Our designers draw the millwork themselves, and it’s manufactured to our specifications, with the layout, architecture, appliances, and lighting all worked out before anyone debates hinge finishes.
Because a cabinet is not just a cabinet, and a tiny sample viewed under fluorescent lighting while you’re hungry and quietly questioning your marriage is not an adequate way to make a $100,000 decision.
For years, people have tried to work out exactly what we are.
Are you Realtors? Designers? Builders?
Yes.
That question assumes those things should be separate. We built our entire company on the belief that they should not be.
We are Realtors because a project begins with the property you buy and what the finished house can support.
We are designers because a home’s value lives in its layout, its architecture, its materials, and the thousands of small decisions that make it feel thoughtful instead of like seven different Pinterest boards were involved.
And we are builders because beautiful drawings that cannot be executed on budget are just expensive fan fiction.
But because I write so often about KC and me, it would be easy to assume this is a two-person operation held together by caffeine, marital tension, and an increasingly complicated Monday.com board.
It is not.
Behind us is a frankly unreasonable bench of people building this company with us.
Our designers have worked on places like the Kimpton Hotel in Denver. They have serious credentials with combinations of letters like NCIDQ in their titles, which means they know considerably more than how to choose a beautiful pillow.
Two members of our team came from Kirkland & Ellis, not as attorneys, but from the operational side of an environment where the standards are high, the pace is relentless, and details are not optional. They now bring that same level of rigor to the systems, service, and logistics behind our work.
And our real estate team is made of veteran brokers who could run successful teams entirely on their own but have, through some combination of true belief or temporary poor judgment, chosen to build this one with us.
These are not people KC and I hired to carry out our ideas.
They are people making the ideas better.
They challenge us, catch what we miss, solve the problems we cannot, and bring a level of expertise no two people could possibly contain on their own.
KC and I do not pretend to be the best at everything. What we are good at is seeing what should exist, finding the people capable of building it, and giving them room to be exceptional. And somehow, through some combination of faith and luck, those people keep choosing us back.
That may be the part of this company (companies, really) that I am proudest of.
The Workshoppe is where the whole team finally has a front door.
Which brings us back to the ceiling.
Three days before our soft opening, water began pouring through it. Not dripping... pouring. I’d like the record to reflect that we had not specified an indoor waterfall. The expansion tank upstairs had burst, sending water into the building we’d just spent months and an upsetting amount of money finishing.
Some people might have read that as a sign from the universe, an invitation to pause and reschedule.
Unfortunately, none of those people were Goros.
My brain skipped grief and went straight to logistics:
Where are the towels? Who has a Shop-Vac? Please, someone, move the wallpaper books. We cleaned it up, repaired what needed repairing, and opened three days later, because the defining feature of my personality is looking at an unreasonable situation and saying, “Okay, but what if we did it anyway?”
Now, this Thursday, we officially open the doors. A Grand Opening.
The part that may finally make me cry is not the cabinetry, although the cabinetry is excellent. It’s not the pink onyx, the wallpaper, the lighting, or the hidden Sub-Zero refrigerator that works perfectly despite several moments when it seemed personally committed to ruining KC’s life.
It’s that so many of you are coming.
You watched when it was an empty storefront. You watched us draw it, build it, change it, flood it, dry it out, and keep going. You hired us, referred us, trusted us with your homes, and believed we were building something worth seeing long before there was much to see. And now you’re coming to stand inside it with us.
This is where KC’s family becomes dangerous.
I can survive a construction delay.
I can survive a flooded ceiling.
I can survive spending nearly $300,000 on a building we do not own while our own historic house waits for someone to address its many needs.
What I may not survive is a room full of people telling me they’re proud of us.
That is advanced emotional material.
There is no Goro protocol for it. No equipment rental. No checklist. Just affection, in public.
So yes, I have a confession: there’s a chance I’ll cry at the Grand Opening.
There’s also a chance I’ll feel one emotion, panic, and start giving a stranger an unnecessarily detailed explanation of our inset cabinetry.
Both are equally likely.
Please come anyway. See what we built, open every drawer, touch everything, and tell us what you’re working on. Celebrate the fact that, despite every sensible reason not to, we did it anyway.
And if you notice my eyes watering, please understand that the building contains a significant amount of construction dust.
The pink onyx may also be releasing some sort of emotional gas. It could be anything.
Just don’t tell the rest of the Goros.
The Grand Opening of The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes
Thursday, July 16 · Winnetka, Illinois
Your favorite emotionally unavailable designer-builder-realtor,
Grace
P.S. Realtors, I especially want you there.
The Workshoppe was not built to court your clients. It was built to give you a trusted place to bring them when they need help understanding what a property could become or making the decisions that come after closing.
Your client relationships belong to you. We believe that strongly enough that we are putting the promise in writing.
More on that soon.
I love reading your articles, Grace. You are a very talented writer, along with your many, many other talents.