Little Red Barn Door Ready For Fresh Start In New Geneva Location

GENEVA, IL — Sylvia Torres remembers walking through downtown Geneva for the first time and feeling like there was no way that everything she saw around her could possibly be real.

As she perused the downtown business district during the city’s annual Christmas Walk, she felt like everything was straight out of a Hallmark movie. From the boutique stores to the people she saw and the quaint small-town feel, Torres remembers looking around and wondering to herself where the film cameras were hiding.

But after running her Little Red Barn Door shop for five years in the Berry House, Torres has discovered Geneva’s uniqueness first-hand. But on Friday, Torres will celebrate a fresh start in a new location at 21 South 3rd Street with a grand opening event at 10 a.m. Friday.

Little Red Barn Door will commemorate the occasion with swag bags for the first 10 people, discounts, hidden gift cards around the store, and raffle baskets that customers will be entered to win when they make a purchase as the home décor shop that has found a home in Geneva over the past five years.

The shop will also be giving away a $50 gift card which customers can win by posing for a photo with the shop's mural wall and tagging the store on social media. Ferdie's Cabin will also be providing refreshments for the grand opening, which runs through 5 p.m. on Friday.

For Torres, who moved to retail after working as an accountant for her family’s steel business, making a name for her and her business has taken work. While she isn’t as much of a mainstay in Geneva as some of her fellow small businesses such as The Little Traveler, Cocoon, and others, her five years in the city have provided her with a perspective of just how special Geneva is.

“I just feel like we’ve come such a long way,” Torres told Patch on Tuesday. “Even though I know it’s been five years, it doesn’t feel like five years. It just feels like time is flying.”

The new space will put Little Red Barn Door front and center after being split over two floors in the Berry House location. The new store location also offers Torres the chance to be at the store much more after spending much of her time over the past couple of years working at the store’s off-site warehouse.

Torres, who also has a branded baby boutique, Little Barn Baby, in Naperville, says that the bigger and more centralized location will give the shop the chance to expand without leaving the city that Torres says is a perfect fit for her business.

Little Barn Baby’s Geneva location will be next door and the bigger store space will allow all of Little Red Barn Door’s retail space to be on one floor as opposed to two as it was in the Berry House location.

“It’s almost surreal,” Torres said of making the move. “It’s very different, the space is much bigger even taking the two spaces we had and combining them. It just feels very, very different.”

Torres has known for a while now that expansion was the next natural step for her business. She has had other cities reach out to her about moving her brand there, but after coming to Torres to shop for the first time from her home in nearby St. Charles, Torres said that she always knew Geneva was the place she wanted to be.

Finding the right storefront space was challenging, she admitted, given the competition to get a foothold within Geneva’s downtown business district. But now that she’s here, she has no plans of leaving anytime soon.

“There’s definitely something special about Geneva and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” Torres said.

Torres describes her home décor business as uniquely hers. She said when she goes to markets to find new merchandise, she relies on an eye she trusts and knows exactly what she wants to see in her store. While surrounded by other one-of-a-kind stores in Geneva, Torres said she avoids comparing her space to anything around her, hoping that her customers fall in love with the things she sells in much of the same way as she did when she first picked it out.

“I try to stay in my own lane,” she said. “I stay focused on what I want and how I want it.”

Getting used to a new space and a bigger store in which to operate will take some getting used to, Torres admits. She is still figuring out where everything will go and how to best utilize the real estate she now has at her disposal. But all of that will come in time, she knows, and for the time being, she is looking forward to serving the customers who have become loyal to her brand while hoping that her new location in the middle of Geneva’s downtown business district will open her up to new clientele.

While Torres knows she can be sometimes too generous — sometimes almost to a fault — she says she only knows one way to business. It’s a business strategy that has served her well for the five years she has been in Geneva, the Hallmark-ish store she fell in love with the first time she saw it. And while finding her way to her new location has required some time and adjustment, she looks forward to not only Friday’s grand opening event, but to the months and years to come as she builds on what the last five years in business have provided.

“I think we’re going to be at home a lot faster than we think because it’s so different,” Torres told Patch. “We’re already comfortable. We walk into our (new) space, and I know it’s our space and we love it and I hope everyone loves it too and is as excited about it as we are.”