How Paul Leongas Went from Running Irish Pubs to Building Commercial Real Estate
Paul Leongas
Nobody plans to become a commercial real estate developer by spending two decades behind a bar. Paul Leongas did it anyway.
After graduating from Michigan State University, Leongas and his sisters Sophia and Lydia bought The Curragh Irish Pub in Schaumburg, Illinois. They were young. They had no real estate background. What they had was a lease, a liquor license, and the kind of stubbornness that keeps restaurants open past year three.
The Curragh ran for over two decades across three locations. Schaumburg came first, then Edison Park, then Skokie. Paul Leongas operated each Chicago-area location for roughly 12 years. Along the way, The Curragh earned the Guinness Gold Standard Award for the Perfect Pint in 2002. Whisky Magazine named it one of the great whisky bars of the world. The family also opened Holland Pub LLC in Holland, Michigan.
But the thing that mattered most for what came next had nothing to do with awards. It was the building knowledge.
Running a restaurant means dealing with every system a commercial building has. Grease traps. Hood ventilation. Electrical panels that trip during Saturday dinner service. Plumbing that backs up at the worst possible moment. HVAC units that quit in July. Paul Leongas did not learn about these systems in a classroom. He learned about them at 11 p.m. on a Friday with a dining room full of people and a kitchen that was supposed to close an hour ago.
Over 12 years in one location, you find out everything that is wrong with a building. Over 12 years at two locations running simultaneously, you find out everything that is wrong with two buildings, and you learn to spot the patterns. The cheap rooftop unit that dies at year seven. The floor drain that was pitched wrong during the original buildout. The electrical panel that has no room for a single additional circuit. These problems repeat across commercial buildings because the same shortcuts get taken by the same kinds of contractors on the same kinds of budgets.
When Paul Leongas launched Axis Development Group LLC in Park Ridge, Illinois, he already understood commercial space the way tenants do. Not as a spreadsheet. As a place where things break, where layout determines whether a business makes money or bleeds it, where the difference between a good landlord and a bad one shows up in the mechanical room at 2 a.m.
Axis Development Group self-performs construction. That means Paul and his crew handle demolition, framing, mechanical coordination, and finishes directly. No general contractor in the middle. No markup on every subcontractor invoice. No telephone game between the developer and the people actually swinging hammers. The reason Paul chose this model is simple: he spent 25 years watching general contractors build commercial spaces that looked fine on paper and fell apart under actual restaurant use. He decided to do it himself.
Today he manages his commercial portfolio across Chicago's North Shore and northwest neighborhoods, the same corridors where he operated restaurants for two decades.
The path from Irish pub operator to commercial developer is not standard. But 25 years of fixing what other people built wrong turns out to be a decent education in how to build things right.