Discover Berwyn
Live Here. Explore Everywhere.
Your guide to Berwyn, Chicago, the western suburbs & everything in between.
Meet the People Behind Discover Berwyn
Berwyn locals exploring the restaurants, music, events, neighborhoods and places that make this area worth calling home.
About
Why We Built Discover Berwyn
We built Discover Berwyn because when we travel, we don’t just want to see the famous places — we want to know what it feels like to live there.
Where do people eat? Where do they gather? Who’s playing? What’s opening? What’s worth discovering just one town over?
That’s the kind of local guide we wanted at home too.
So we built one.
Discover Berwyn is about restaurants, music, events, local businesses, neighborhoods, interesting people, old buildings, hidden places and things worth doing — with real estate woven in because that’s what we happen to know pretty well too.
Our Story
Meet Paul & Michelle
Berwyn Became Home Almost by Accident
We Really Do Explore Everywhere
Music Is a Big Part of Our Life
We’d Rather Rescue Than Replace.
Food Is Usually Part of the Adventure
Violet Goes Too
Before Real Estate
Before real estate, both of us spent years in corporate careers.
Paul spent 26 years with Nordstrom, including 18 years as a women’s shoe buyer and executive.
Michelle was an executive with BMW and worked as a regional trainer.
Those careers were very different, but they taught us some of the same things:
Listen to people. Pay attention to details. Know your product. Solve problems. Take care of people after the sale, not just while you’re trying to earn their business.
Michelle and Her Buyers
Paul and Sellers
We built Discover Berwyn to help people experience this area the way we do — not just as a place to live, but as a place to explore.
Restaurants. Music. Events. Local businesses. Neighborhoods. People. Places worth knowing.
And if somewhere along the way you start thinking, “Yeah, I could live here,” we can help with that too.
Live Here. Explore Everywhere.
📬 Stay in the Know
Get one monthly email with the best events, restaurants, music, local finds and things to do across Berwyn, Chicago and the western suburbs.
🏡 Real Estate
We also help clients buy and sell homes throughout Berwyn, Riverside, Brookfield, La Grange, Oak Park, Forest Park, Chicago, and the surrounding suburbs.
We can also help with estate sales, downsizing, and complete home clean-outs, giving you a single point of contact for the entire process.
If you ever have questions about the local market, need a trusted referral, or are curious about your home's value, we're always happy to help.
We’re Paul Froiland and Michelle Russell. Berwyn residents, Realtors, music junkies, travelers, foodies, vintage hunters, dog people and the couple behind Discover Berwyn and Russell Froiland Residential.
Since 2017, we’ve helped more than 300 families buy, sell, invest and relocate throughout Berwyn, Chicago and the western suburbs, closing more than $90 million in real estate along the way.
But Discover Berwyn came from something much more personal.
It came from the way we actually live.
Paul ended up in Berwyn while looking for a place to start the next chapter of his life.
He wanted something affordable, with character, and he has always loved bungalows. He found a little one in Berwyn that felt right.
At first, it was simply the right house at the right time.
Then it became home.
We met on Bumble during COVID. About two years later, when Michelle’s rent in La Grange increased, we realized we weren’t really talking about two separate lives anymore.
We were in this for the long haul.
Michelle moved into the bungalow, and Berwyn became our home.
Since then we’ve made friends here, built businesses here, found our favorite restaurants and neighborhood hangouts, spent summer afternoons at the Berwyn pool (AKA The Berwyn Country Club) and discovered just how much is within a train ride of our front door.
And we got married here too, with a small group of friends on the patio at La Parra.
Sometimes the place you choose because it makes sense becomes the place that means the most.
We take Metra and CTA everywhere we can.
We’ll head downtown for a museum or show, into neighboring Oak Park for dinner, to Milwaukee, WI for a concert, or wander around a neighborhood we’ve never really explored before.
We love our restaurants right here in Berwyn and local places in neighboring communities too.
We dig through records at Val’s Halla in Oak Park. We watch Bears games with friends at The James Joyce and Godsons, where everyone brings food.
Sometimes we’re out constantly. There really is always something to do in Chicagoland.
And sometimes the best night of the week is simply sitting together in our backyard with our dog nearby and a fire going.
We love exploring.
But we also love home.
Calling us music fans might be underselling it.
Paul’s first concert was America at the Universal Amphitheatre in 1979. His first show on his own was The Who and The Clash at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1983.
Michelle's first official show was Willie Nelson, after that it was No Doubt and The Goo Goo Dolls in the '90s.
Since then, we’ve been to hundreds of concerts, festivals and shows, seeing artists ranging from David Bowie and The Sex Pistols to Nine Inch Nails, The Police and countless others.
One room in our house has essentially become a personal music museum — guitars, records, posters, photographs and memorabilia collected over decades.
For us, music is about more than collecting bands on a list.
We think of music as a kind of universal religion.
It’s one of the rare places where people from completely different backgrounds, beliefs and experiences can stand shoulder to shoulder and, for a few hours, share the same experience in unity.
Everybody knows the song.
Everybody feels the chorus.
Everybody belongs to the same crowd.
Michelle is every bit as serious about music. The National is her band, and she’s seen them around 20 times. One of her favorite lyrics — ‘I'm a festival, I'm a parade’ — is even set into a brick paver at FitzGerald’s, which Paul bought for her to commemorate their 2026 marriage and life together.
We plan trips around music.
Almost everything in our home has had a life before us.
Our furniture, art, records, dishes, lamps and décor mostly came from estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores, Goodwill or things someone else was ready to let go.
We rarely buy new unless it's underwear and socks.
Part of that is because we genuinely think older things are often better made and more interesting. A 1960s Paul McCobb Étagère, a vintage record player, old speakers, records, art and odd little objects collected over time have more character to us than a room ordered from a catalog.
But it’s also a philosophy.
There is already so much stuff in the world.
We like saving things. Fixing them. Repurposing them. Giving them another chapter.
We've been antiquing and reselling since the 1990s, and Paul especially has a hard time walking past something interesting that other people have dismissed as junk.
The best part is the story.
Who owned it?
Where did it come from?
Why did somebody save it?
How did it survive this long?
Nothing in our home matches because it came from a catalog.
It matches because we found it, chose it, saved it, fixed it and gave it a place in our life.
Michelle has celiac disease, so eating out requires a little more planning.
Fortunately, gluten-free dining has gotten dramatically better, and Michelle has turned finding great GF restaurants into another part of exploring.
Michelle is the meal planner and usually knows where we’re going or what we’re eating before Paul has figured out the plan.
At home, we both cook.
Paul will happily claim expert status in mashed potatoes, deviled eggs and seared big-eye tuna.
Michelle’s specialty is making salmon bowls, salads and something out of almost nothing.
Early in our relationship, we were having sweet potato fries and realized we were out of ketchup.
Michelle started mixing pickled beets, honey, mustard and a few other things together.
Somehow, it worked.
That pretty much sums her up.
Inventive, practical and convinced there is almost always a way to make something work with whatever is already available.
We’re rescue-dog people.
We lost our Hazel to old age this year (2026), and we still miss her.
Violet is still very much with us, a nine-pound Shih Tzu who has become a full-fledged member of the travel department.
She goes just about everywhere she can with us and even has her own Instagram page, Violet on Vacation.
Road trips, patios, weekends away, Violet generally assumes she has been invited.
And usually she has.
Michelle genuinely loves working with buyers.
There really isn’t a buyer she has worked with who hasn’t become some version of a friend.
She stays in touch, sees past clients regularly, remembers their families and rarely shows up around their kids without something in hand.
Usually Tootsie Pops.
Her grandfather always kept Tootsie Pops in a paint can when she was growing up.
Now she carries that little tradition forward with the families she works with.
To Michelle, buying a home isn’t just a transaction.
It’s a relationship.
Paul primarily works with sellers and listings.
After hundreds of transactions, we’ve learned that selling a home rarely fits perfectly into a checklist.
Sometimes it’s straightforward.
Sometimes it’s an inherited property filled with decades of belongings.
Sometimes someone is downsizing, relocating, dealing with a property that needs work, navigating financial difficulty or simply standing in a basement full of stuff wondering where to begin.
We’ve dealt with all of it.
Pricing. Preparation. Contractors. Clean-outs. Estate sales. Difficult properties. Short sales. Negotiations. And plenty of situations that did not come with an instruction manual.
Our job isn’t simply putting a sign in the yard.
It’s helping people figure out what comes next.