Yesterday 23M people watched our lemonade stand

I did not send a Substack last week.

And here is the thing: you probably did not notice.

Nobody emailed asking where it went, the earth kept spinning, and my business did not collapse.

I am not fishing for “we missed you” replies. Though… feel free.

I bring it up because it is the single most useful piece of information I can give you about why most people never build the thing they actually want to build.

We think everyone is watching. Closely. With notes.

So we freeze.

“I do not want to post this, it is cringe, everyone will see it.”

“I need to revise the marketing one more time, the tenth time, until it is perfect.”

“I cannot start the kitchen until I have figured out absolutely everything.”

This is perfection paralysis, and it runs on a fantasy: that there is an audience out there studying your every move, ready to pounce the second you get something wrong.

There is not.

As my mother likes to remind me when I start overanalyzing, with great love and zero sentimentality:

Which is a funny thing to claim this particular week, because as I write this, a video I posted on Instagram of our family and a lemonade stand is somewhere north of twenty-three million views.

Twenty-three million people, thinking about me.

Except they are not.

They are thinking about a moment. A lemonade stand on a street people recognized from a movie, a ten-second clip that made them smile while they stood in line somewhere.

Most of them do not know my name. Most of them never will.

And that is fine, because attention is rented. Trust is earned.

The viral moments are exciting, and they are fleeting.

What matters is what someone finds after they find you. A point of view. A body of work. A business that solves a real problem. Or just a person standing in the middle of the internet hoping one lucky post changes everything.

That lemonade stand only matters because it is sitting on top of years of showing up before anyone was watching. I can reach millions today because I spent a long time reaching almost no one.

That is true of nearly everything worth doing, from businesses to renovations. Nobody starts where they end up.

You earn the right to be heard the same way you earn most things. One rep at a time.

There is a problem I’ve been preparing to solve for years, because I watch it happen all the time.

Someone has a kitchen, a primary bath, or one room they have been dreaming about, and a real budget to do it well.

And they struggle to find a good design firm to take the project on. They might hear, “The project is too small.” Or, “I’m sorry, but you don’t meet our minimum.”

It is not their taste and it is not their money. It is how the business is built.

When people say hire a designer - especially in architectural design, which is what my firm does - they usually mean full-service: the whole house, taken to the studs, a relationship that runs for years. That is the work I love, and it is priced honestly for what it takes.

But it only works at one scale, and that scale is usually the whole house.

A single room, no matter how well you want to do it, is usually not a big enough project for a full-service firm to take on.

And there is a real reason for it. To make a full-service project work, the materials alone need to clear about half a million dollars, before you even get to the design fee or the construction costs. It’s just how the economics work when you have a full staff executing every detail.

No shade. Most big firms work this way, mine included.

But you should not have to know any of that to get help with your kitchen.

Which leaves a very large number of people standing in a hallway with two doors and nothing in between.

Door one: hire a full-service designer and commit to the whole house, the whole budget, the multi-year timeline.

Door two: do it yourself, with Pinterest and a contractor who is excellent at building and was never once hired to have taste.

If your project does not justify door one, you get pushed toward door two.

And I am not talking about people who do not know what they want. I am talking about the opposite.

The Workshoppe by Kaage Homes opens in just a couple of weeks.

It’s not just a design studio. Not just a store.

It is something new.

It is the other way in.

You bring your measurements, sit down with our veteran designers, and describe your vision. We draw it. You shop the design from our in-person library of materials, hand the drawings to your GC, and run your own project.

Your build, your timeline, our eye.

No long-term contract, no months-long engagement, no retainer. A single room or a single afternoon, on your terms, and you walk away with exactly what you came for.

Once you are through that door, there are three ways to work with us, and the on-ramp is genuinely accessible:

• The Sourcing Session - $500: for when you already have the design or the plans and just need help choosing and buying the right materials.

• The Essentials Intensive - $2,500: for one focused room, a powder room, a bar, a refresh you want to get exactly right.

• The Signature Intensive - $3,700: for one of the bigger swings, a kitchen, a primary bath, any one room that requires real detail.

Those are founding rates, locked in for the people who book early. They rise after that.

With either Intensive, two sessions is all it takes. You leave with a full set of design drawings you can actually build from, and all of your materials priced.

We’re known for luxury design. Gorgeous real estate. Natural materials. High-end products. But we're just as committed to making good design more accessible.

So why am I so obsessed with getting you an affordable, beautiful, immersive and fun design experience you’ll actually use?

Real estate.

As we know, my family has sold beautiful homes for three generations. After that long, you cannot look at a design decision without also seeing what it does to the value of the home.

It’s the reason we did it this way, bringing real estate and design together. So you get agents who actually understand construction. And designers who care as much about resale value as they do about how a room looks. All on the same team.

And here is the honest thing almost no one in design will say out loud: not every house should get a six-figure materials budget. On the wrong home, in the wrong neighborhood, that money does not come back. It over-improves the place.

So the right answer is not always “spend more.” Sometimes it is “spend exactly right, on the rooms that matter, and stop.”

Full-service is perfect for people who want the white-glove experience. Designers on site. A full procurement team. Endless revisions. GC coordination. The Workshoppe is the other way. A design workshop (see what we did there) where you get to be the designer for a day and we produce your drawings with pricing for every material from cabinetry to fixtures and stone. Then, you run with it.

Remember that lemonade stand? Twenty-three million people watched it because they recognized our street from Home Alone.

What most of them have not pieced together yet is that our house is in the movie too.

We own Old Man Marley’s house.

And once the Workshoppe opens, we’ll start planning that restoration, right here, in front of all of you. Every paint color, every cabinet, every slab of stone, every decision.

Here is the funny part. In the middle of building this thing, I realized I was building the exact place I already wanted for myself, because this is how I work anyway.

I collect samples. I compare materials. I sketch and I obsess and I live with the options until the right answer finally shows itself.

Now all of it happens in one place.

So if you have ever wondered how a restoration actually comes together, not the tidy reveal at the end but the hundreds of decisions that happen before a single wall gets painted, stay close.

There is one final reason this has been on my mind. The Foresman.

For those of you new here, it is a sixty-lot neighborhood that our real estate group is selling in Glenview. Not finished houses. Just land. Sixty. Lots.

Forty lots are already spoken for. Several more are builder reserved. By the time you read this, there may only be a dozen or so left.

What fascinates me is not the pace.

It is the people.

We all like to imagine that the people who build custom homes were issued some secret confidence the rest of us never got, that someone handed them a permission slip along the way.

After a year of talking to one buyer after another, I can tell you the truth:

They are regular people, with jobs and mortgages and doubts, exactly like the rest of us.

The only difference is that at some point they stopped waiting.

For certainty, for the perfect plan, for the feeling of being ready. They just decided.

The people who build the house, start the business, renovate the kitchen, or post the thing are not braver than the rest of us.

And I am not telling you any of this from the top of some mountain. Everything I am good at now, I was once bad at.

My first real estate deal was a short sale. The first condo I ever designed was a foreclosure.

What changed was not talent. It was reps, and the grace to be new at something before I was any good at it.

And if that thing happens to be a design project or a new home, we’re ready to help. No project is too small. Or too big.

Will we still do full-service? You bet. It will remain the heart of our design work.

But full-service is an enormous lift, and I can only take a tiny handful of projects a year.

It has always quietly killed me to turn down the small room with big style, the one project that would have been pure joy.

Not anymore. I finally built the place that lets us say yes.

Our doors open for the first time on June 19, the weekend of the Winnetka Music Festival, so the first look happens with the whole town out on Lincoln.

And next week, when I send the pre-booking links, you are first in line.

That is what showing up gets you.

And you have shown up for me just by being here. I’m truly grateful.

So if you know someone who has been dreaming about a kitchen and just needs a designer to nod and hand them a drawing, send them this.

We will draw your vision.

We will price your vision.

We will get your materials on site. And then you and your favorite GC can run with it.

The Workshoppe is coming soon. And Old Man Marley’s house will follow.

Until next Sunday,

Grace

P.S. If you’re a builder, designer or realtor reading this today, stay tuned. We have special trade programs and services coming soon - just for you.