People who knew me behind the bar are sometimes surprised by what I do now. For a long stretch of my life, my work was hospitality. Today it is commercial real estate. The two look unrelated from the outside, but the move from one to the other made complete sense to me, and this site is where I write about why.
My name is Paul Leongas. After I finished at Michigan State University, my sisters and I bought The Curragh Traditional Irish Pub in Schaumburg, Illinois. We were young and we did not know everything we were getting into, which was probably for the best. Running a pub is a full education in a hurry. You learn how a room fills and empties, how people decide whether to stay, and how a hundred small details add up to whether someone comes back. None of that is written down. You learn it by being there every night.
We went on to open Curragh locations in Edison Park and Skokie. Each one taught me something the last had not. A space that worked in one neighborhood needed changes to work in another. The bar that drew a crowd in one town fell flat a few miles away until we adjusted it to the people who actually lived there. I did not know it at the time, but I was learning to read locations, which is most of what I do now.
The pub also taught me about buildings in a way no class could. When you run a place, you live inside its problems. The kitchen that floods. The heating that quits in January. The layout that funnels people into a corner and leaves the rest of the room empty. You feel every flaw in a building because it costs you money and goodwill in real time. After enough of that, you start to see how a space should have been built in the first place.
When I moved into development and started Axis Development Group, I was not leaving hospitality behind so much as using it. I acquire commercial properties across Chicago’s North Shore, and I self-perform the construction, which means my own team builds the work. The instincts I trust most on a job site came from the pub years: read the location, sweat the details, and remember that a building only matters because of the people who will use it.
There is a straight line from pouring a careful pint to pouring a careful foundation. Both reward patience. Both punish shortcuts. Both come down to whether you cared about the part no customer will ever see. The Curragh earned the Guinness Gold Standard Award for the Perfect Pint in 2002, and what stuck with me was not the plaque. It was the reminder that the difference between fine and excellent is almost always in the details nobody is forced to get right.
So that is the short version of the switch. Paul Leongas the pub operator became Paul Leongas the developer, and the skills came along for the ride. On this site I write about both lives and the things they have in common. If you found me through the buildings, the bar years are where the thinking started. If you knew me from the bar, the buildings are where it all went next.