A Different Kind of Dream Home

Close your eyes for a moment, and picture your dream home.

Where is it?

What do you see when you walk through the front door?

What does it smell like?

Who is there?

Hold that house in your mind for a second.

I sold mine.

Apparently, when I closed my eyes, I pictured a 20,000 square foot showroom with at least 30 sofas and 68 accent chairs.

I'm kidding. Sort of.

A little over a year ago, Phil and I made a decision that probably didn't make sense to everyone around us. We sold the home we loved in Sunset Hills and used that money to help buy Seville Home.

It was, by nearly every definition, our dream home. A three-story English Tudor, more than 100 years old, with 5,700 square feet of character we had barely begun to fill. For the short time we owned it, we poured our hearts and souls into it. It was the kind of home I had imagined my kids and grandkids coming back to for the holidays.

And we sold it to buy a furniture store.

Yesterday, one year in, we stood inside that store surrounded by our team, our clients, our friends, our vendor partners and the Leawood Chamber for a ribbon cutting to mark the first year.

Standing there, I realized I had the dream home wrong from the beginning.

The house in Sunset Hills was not really my dream. It was a copy.

The original was my grandmother's house. Wood, with a deck and a patio out back, and the smell of freshly cut hay when you stepped out of the car. Inside, something was almost always cooking, because someone was almost always about to walk in.

Her house was open to anyone and everyone. I spent whole summers there, and more ordinary days than I could count, and I was never the only one. Nobody was invited, exactly. You just went, because that was where everybody was going to be.

There was a white sofa in the family room that we were not allowed to sit on. I have now spent a year learning more about upholstery than I ever planned to, and I still could not tell you what that sofa was made of. Nobody ever got close enough to find out.

The maroon sofa in the sunken living room, on the other hand, we absolutely could sit on, and did, all of us at once. The television sat awkwardly in a corner, playing whatever my grandpa wanted to watch, which was usually Hee Haw. Live plants crowded the doors out to the patio. No designer would have styled it that way, and it did not matter. It was the most visited room I have ever been in.

When Phil and I bought the house in Sunset Hills, that room is what I was trying to build. Not the finishes. The destination. The place my kids, and someday their kids, would drive to for Thanksgiving without anyone having to ask.

I sold it before I got the chance.

I looked around Seville Home yesterday and realized it has become the house I was trying to build.

People show up here. Nobody has to be asked.

Not because of the 30 sofas. Or the 68 accent chairs.

Okay, maybe a little because of the chairs.

But mostly because of the people.

It is our designers, who care so deeply about the people who trust us with their homes that they will even include your little dog, Peanut, in the design plans.

It is the homeowners who bring us plans for the house they have dreamed about, the builders and interior designers who let us be one small part of their work, and the clients who have shopped here so long they could practically work here.

It is the community that welcomed us. Taylor Limoges at the Leawood Chamber helped us find our footing here, and one introduction led to another until this store started feeling less like a business we owned and more like a place we belonged.

It is partners like John Nicholson, our Bernhardt rep, and Dawn Pearson, who helped us lay out the Bernhardt Interiors Gallery, who believed in what we wanted to build here. And Alex Bernhardt Jr., who came to Kansas City to celebrate the grand reopening of that gallery with us. He came at the end of a long week, and he was generous, kind and interested in everyone he met. He has a rare ability to hold a room without taking it over. Bernhardt is a family business with generations behind it. Seville Home has more than 25 years of its own, and Phil and I are simply the people lucky enough to be writing the next chapter.

My grandmother's house had one thing Sunset Hills never got the chance to have. Years.

People had been walking through that kitchen door for decades before I ever did.

Seville Home came full in the same way. Relationships came with it. Stories came with it. So did customers who remember what the store looked like years ago, employees who have poured part of their lives into it, and vendors who have watched it change.

With that comes the privilege, and the responsibility, of deciding what happens next.

Phil and I sold our dream home to take that on.

I would be lying if I said there weren't moments this year when I wondered what in the world we had done. Long days. Hard decisions. More to learn than I could have understood when we signed the papers.

Then there are days like yesterday, when I stand in the middle of the store, look around at who showed up, and understand exactly why we did it.

We bought a different kind of dream home. A place filled with beautiful things, yes. But more importantly, a place filled with people.

To everyone who has walked through these doors, trusted one of our designers, bought a sofa, sent a friend, brought us a project, partnered with us, encouraged us or simply stopped by to see what we were up to, thank you.

You are the life inside Seville Home. We do not take it lightly that you keep choosing a local business for something as personal as the places where your own lives happen.

Because 30 years from now, nobody will remember the exact shade of the sofa.

They will remember that they kept coming back to it, and who was sitting there when they did.

Welcome home.