Enrollment for The Design Office closes tonight at 11:59 p.m. Central.
Hey friend,
Today is the last day to enroll in The Design Office. Doors close tonight at 11:59 p.m. Central.
If you already know you’re in, enroll here. If not, stay with me. I have a story about a toaster.
A toaster that could have saved Kodak.
Picture it. The year is 1975.
Bell bottoms, shag carpet, avocado green appliances as far as the eye can see.
And in a lab in Rochester, New York, a 25-year-old Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson is building something that looks a little like a toaster.
It weighs eight pounds. It takes 23 seconds to record a photograph. The image is black and white, wildly unimpressive by today’s standards, and saved onto a cassette tape.
A cassette tape.
It is also the first digital camera.
Which is a fairly extraordinary thing to invent when you work for a company whose entire empire depends on people continuing to buy film.
Steve shows it to Kodak. And Kodak does not throw him out of the building. They do not think he is an idiot. They do not fail to understand that the technology is interesting.
They understand it. They just have an enormously successful business built around something else. Film.
Film is profitable. People want it. Kodak is synonymous with photography.
So they shelve this prototype, the digital camera. It goes into a box in whatever place good ideas go to cry. And Kodak keeps doing what it does.
And for a while, it works. Right up until the rest of the world picks up the idea Kodak has been sitting on and runs with it. Digital cameras arrive. Then phones with cameras in them. Then, one day, the world stops buying film.
In 2012, Kodak, the company that invented the digital camera, files for bankruptcy.
And that is the part of the story I cannot stop thinking about. Not because Kodak failed to see the future. Because they saw it. They were holding it.
And still, the easier decision was to keep doing what they already knew.
There is something almost painfully human about that.
And Kodak is not alone.
Fast forward to the year 2000. A guy named Reed Hastings flies to Dallas with a scrappy little DVD-by-mail company and offers to sell it to Blockbuster, the undisputed king of Friday night, for $50 million.
Blockbuster reportedly can barely keep a straight face. They pass.
That scrappy little company is Netflix.
Ten years later, Blockbuster files for bankruptcy. Today there is exactly one Blockbuster left on planet Earth, in Bend, Oregon.
It is adorable. It is also a museum of a decision.
Neither company was run by fools. They were run by smart, successful people doing the sensible thing, protecting what was already working.
Most expensive decisions do not feel expensive when you make them.
Sometimes they feel like doing nothing. Waiting another year. Keeping the kitchen where it is because moving it sounds complicated. Approving the floor plan because everyone is tired of talking about it.
Assuming you can pick the plumbing later. Telling yourself you will figure out the lighting once construction starts. Buying the beautiful house because you are in love with it and deciding you will worry about what it actually needs after closing.
None of those decisions comes with a flashing red sign that says:
THIS ONE WILL COST YOU.
Usually the opposite. The expensive decision often feels like the conservative one. The easy one. The thing you can deal with later.
And then later arrives.
This is probably why I have become borderline insufferable about the order in which we make decisions about houses.
Because I am guessing you are a little insufferable about houses too.
Maybe you are the person who drives past an old house and notices the windows. Not the landscaping. Not the car in the driveway. The windows.
Maybe someone says, “It was completely updated,” and you immediately become suspicious.
Maybe you understand, instinctively, that making an old house function like a new one does not require making it look like a new one. You want the new mechanicals. You want the great water pressure. You want the hidden outlets and the properly sized closets and the kitchen that works for the way your family actually lives.
You would also very much like everyone to keep their hands off the original staircase.
Perhaps you have opinions about marble. Strong ones.
Or you know the particular sadness of seeing a beautiful old room stripped of everything that made it interesting and then filled back up with expensive things.
Maybe you can tell when a house feels right, even if you cannot yet explain why. You know when the proportions are good. You know when a material looks wrong. You know when somebody has tried a little too hard. You know what you love.
And then comes the much harder part. What do you actually do?
Which wall moves, and which one stays. Where the money goes. What should be original, and what should only look original. What gets decided now, and what absolutely cannot wait until later. How you take the 600 images you have saved and turn them into one house that feels like it was always supposed to be that way.
That gap, between knowing what you like and knowing what to do, is much bigger than people realize.
It is also exactly what I wanted to teach.
I did not build The Design Office because I think you should become a designer.
Or an architect. Or a contractor. Please, do not become a contractor because of me.
I built it because I think the person making one of the largest investments of her life should understand her own project.
She should be able to walk into a meeting and know what matters. She should understand why the architect is asking that question now. She should know why the plumbing fixtures are being discussed when there is not yet a wall to hang them on.
She should know when a bid is missing something. She should know which decisions are aesthetic and which ones quietly determine the entire project. She should be able to look at a house and see not only what it is, but what it could reasonably become.
That is what we are doing for seven weeks.
We start with the house itself. Is this the right property? Should you stay, renovate, add on, move, or build? What are you actually trying to create?
Then we move into the team, the plans, the materials, the design, the money, the ordering, and finally the part nobody talks about enough: how you protect the thing you designed once dozens of other people are involved in building it.
In other words, we are not spending seven weeks talking about pretty rooms. We are talking about how pretty rooms actually happen.
I wish I had understood all of this earlier.
Which is slightly embarrassing, because I had every advantage. Real estate is the family business. I grew up around houses. I knew people to call.
I became a managing broker by thirty. I spent years walking properties, studying value, negotiating transactions and watching what buyers responded to.
And I still made mistakes.
I still remember realizing that a plumbing fixture I thought I had plenty of time to select had a valve that needed to be inside a wall that was about to be closed. I remember making decisions later than I should have. I remember learning that the order matters almost as much as the decision itself.
Today, I have an entire team around me. Designers. Builders. Project managers. Agents. Trades. People whose literal jobs are to catch things before they become expensive.
That is a very different experience from standing in your own half-demolished house thinking, Was I supposed to know that already?
I remember that version of this very clearly.
The Design Office is for her.
And yes, these decisions have had financial consequences too.
We bought our first condo in foreclosure for $418,000 and later sold it for $650,000. We bought our Logan Square house for $750,000 and later sold it for $2.35 million. We bought our Winnetka house for $1.685 million and sold it for $3.75 million.
I want to be very precise about what I mean when I tell you that. Those numbers are not a promise. Those projects required substantial investment, risk, work, timing and a market that none of us controls.
But I also refuse to pretend the design decisions were irrelevant. They were not.
What you do with your kitchen matters. What you preserve matters. What you remove matters. How much you spend matters. What you spend it on matters. Whether the house still makes sense when you are finished matters.
Good design is not just decoration added after the important decisions have been made. Good design is a series of important decisions.
And when they are made well, they can change how a house lives, how it feels, and yes, sometimes what it is worth.
Which brings me back to Kodak.
I am not about to compare your kitchen layout to the fall of Kodak. That would be unhinged. (Mostly.)
But I do think there is a quieter lesson in that story that applies here.
Knowing is not the same thing as acting. Seeing potential is not the same thing as knowing how to realize it.
And waiting feels incredibly safe right up until the moment it becomes expensive.
If you have spent the last week reading these emails, watching the masterclass, saving the posts, looking at your own house and thinking, This is exactly the stuff I need to understand, then I do not think you need another reason.
Closing the gap between knowing and doing is exactly what The Design Office was built to do. But I think you already know that.
The question is just… will you, or won’t you?
Enrollment closes tonight.
The Founding Cohort of The Design Office begins October 26. For seven weeks, I am going to open up the way I look at houses and walk you through the design decisions I make, in the order I make them. Your printed Executive Binder will arrive before we begin.
Founding Cohort enrollment is $2,497. And honestly, I can’t promise it will ever be offered at this founding price again.
We already have students enrolled from all over the country, from New York to Georgia to right here in the Midwest. And this is only the beginning.
If you are planning a $500,000 renovation, that is about one-half of one percent of the money you are preparing to spend on the project itself.
Put differently, you will spend about 0.5% of your budget learning how to protect the other 99.5%.
One little secret before you go: if you haven’t watched my free masterclass yet, stay all the way to the end. There’s a promo code in there for $250 off your Design Office enrollment.
And at 11:59 p.m. Central tonight, the doors close for good.
Enroll in The Design Office before 11:59 p.m. Central tonight.
With so much gratitude and zero cassette tapes,
Grace
P.S. If you read all of this and thought, “Actually, Grace, I would prefer that your team just do this for me,” fair. That is what Kaage Homes full-service design is for. Reply and we will point you in the right direction to submit your project.