What does a Turkish rug have to do with the Kingdom of God? If you ask Evan Gage ’19MTS, everything. Or at least, more than most people might think.
The experience of shopping at Gage Goods is, well, an experience. The store, if you can call it that, is located in a warehouse, which Gage and his friends call “The Complex.” To get there, my husband and I had to park in a lot surrounded by barbed wire, wait for a break in the traffic speeding both ways down Sample Street and dart on foot to the industrial park on the other side.
Once inside, we passed an open cooler of free drinks on the stairs and pushed our way through the heavy rugs hanging over the door into the shop.
I was struck first by the incense. The music that fills the shop is an eclectic mix: Texas folk, Turkish tracks from a former student of Gage’s who became a DJ, some French tunes, Japanese karaoke hits from the ’80s. It takes a few circuits of the store before you’ve seen the full assortment of wares.
These periodic sales, in a space that used to serve merely as storage for Gage’s rugs, aren’t the easiest events to stumble upon. He typically announces them on Instagram and Facebook just a few days in advance. Lately, they’ve been happening about once a month, though there’s no set schedule. According to his friends, the unpredictability only adds to the mystique. That’s good for Gage, who isn’t trying to cultivate a “brand” with these quirks — he just gets so caught up in the day to day sometimes that he doesn’t get around to advertising the opening of the shop.
The last time I went to a public sale at Gage Goods, I went home with a Japanese tea set with hexagonal cups made in the 1970s. I had also spotted a coyote-tooth necklace, plus a $495 pectoral cross crafted by a defunct religious order. It had been casually resting on a plain white plate with an amusing label: “Just a white dish as far as I’m concerned.”
Drawing on his time in Turkey and his theology studies at Notre Dame, Gage curates and sells authentic goods from around the world, especially Turkish rugs. He didn’t set out to open a shop. When he was growing up in suburban Kansas City, his parents took him to monthly artist sales, where he was surrounded by handmade goods and vibrant creativity.
That early exposure to craft and culture shaped the questions he began asking as a student, about beauty, belief and how people live. While studying English, history and religion at Hillsdale College in Michigan, he traveled to Turkey for the first time through an honors program in the summer of 2013.
That summer, in the winding streets of Antalya on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, he stumbled upon a small bookstore. The shopkeeper, Kemal, asked about Gage’s favorite writers. When Gage said “Annie Dillard,” Kemal invited him to meet some American friends, one of whom was a Fulbright scholar. Inspired, Gage applied for a Fulbright himself.
He was awarded the scholarship and returned in fall 2014 to teach English in Tokat, a city near the Black Sea. He spent a year immersed in a culture where daily life centered on community, presence and generosity — values he wanted to bring back home.
Katelin Morey, a childhood friend, says Gage has always been community-oriented and generous, but Gage feels that Turkey planted a deeper way of being with others. “Everyone’s assumption every single night was that we were going to hang out,” he says. “Not that you had to every night, but single or not, children or not, people are going to be together.”
Friends in America spoke of the deep loneliness of life after college, an experience so at odds with his own.
As he wandered Tokat’s bazaars with friends, he began to notice the rugs. He discovered how their craftsmanship, traditional styles and colors reflected local customs. He especially admired those dyed with native plants whose colors were unique to an area — in Tokat, the variety of reds from the locally grown madder plant and the soft blues from the harder-to-find indigo. He appreciated the regional meanings behind specific designs, which made each rug distinct.
One day, he purchased a large, flat-woven rug as a souvenir. It was a deep red, with long lines and geometric shapes in shades of black and white running its length.
Back in the United States, Gage spent two years teaching 12th-grade humanities at Trinity School at River Ridge in Minnesota. Captivated by Turkey and eager to continue his studies there, he then enrolled in Notre Dame’s graduate theology program to research the history of Christianity, especially within Asia Minor.
A friend in South Bend offered to let Gage stay in his basement, and for the next several years, that became home. But during his first week there, disaster struck, and the basement flooded. Many of his possessions had to be tossed, and the carpet was ripped out. What once felt like a spacious room suddenly became cold and cavernous.
“I had that one rug” from Tokat, Gage says, “and I put it down and thought, It’s true what they say — a good rug really does tie a space together.”
Gage’s graduate research often sent him to back to Turkey, where he immersed himself in language and culture. Under faculty adviser Robin Jensen, a specialist in early Christian art, he focused on the mosaics and frescoes of the Chora Monastery church in Istanbul, originally a fourth-century Byzantine structure now functioning as a mosque. He explored how Theodore Metochites, a 14th-century statesman and patron who oversaw the building’s restoration and completion, used art, color and space to convey theological meaning, from Christ’s divinity to the role of the individual in the divine plan. That interplay between the physical and the spiritual resonated with Gage, shaping his growing interest in early Christian architecture and archaeology.
During the summer of 2018, he worked as an archivist at the American Research Institute in Turkey. He was also awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship. But because of lingering dangers from an attempted coup in the country two years earlier, Gage’s sponsoring organization required him to complete the eight-week intensive language-learning with a Turkish-speaking host family in Azerbaijan, a small country to Turkey’s east.
There he struck up friendships with artisans and shopkeepers. Some vendors, mistaking him for an undercover wholesaler, began offering bulk rug deals. Gage admits it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption.
With $3,000 to his name he bought 10 10-by-13-foot rugs. “I had absolutely no plan,” Gage admits. “It was just a cool deal. It was, retrospectively, insane. I was in graduate school. I was making no money. What was I doing?”
When he returned to the U.S., a friend from the theology program — also a former Trinity School colleague and housemate — expressed interest. Gage offered him a rug at “a price that a student with an MTS stipend could afford.”
The friend appreciated the offer but pushed back: Gage, he said, was undervaluing the rugs. He suggested Gage bring them back to the neighborhood where they used to live outside the Twin Cities and sell them there. He drove the rugs to Minnesota, breaking his car’s rear coil springs beneath hundreds of pounds of wool in the process.
He sold every rug, pocketing more money in one trip than he had in six weeks of teaching. “It just kind of felt like, wait a minute, there might be something to this,” he says.
Meanwhile, Gage was figuring out what he wanted for his future. Although he had considered a doctorate at Notre Dame, he wasn’t necessarily aiming to become a college professor. What he had instead was curiosity, warmth and a habit of inviting people into his life that his time in Turkey had only further instilled.
He was trying to live in the questions: What does divine love embodied actually look like? How do we build lives where generosity isn’t a transaction? His classroom was the dinner table. His closest friendships were forged in shared meals and long conversations about faith, literature, culture, queerness and what it means to belong.
He completed his studies, then returned to Turkey that summer to work as a guide for undergraduate students performing research. And to officially start sourcing goods. He had decided that, at least part-time, he wanted to sell Turkish rugs, using his knowledge of Turkey, the culture and the rugs — plus his friendships with small-business owners — to sell items with real stories.
“He never looked back. He just got really involved with these people in this place,” Jensen, an emerita professor of theology, says. “I think not to pursue the Ph.D., but to do this instead, is sometimes a really good sign that people don’t get funneled immediately off into academic contentedness. They keep going. This is a degree — a useful knowledge and worldliness that you gain, and you can use it in a lot of ways.”
Gage continued working at Notre Dame as a Fulbright U.S. student program adviser, and he was offered a choice: Either switch to full time or stay part time in a temporary position.
He enjoyed helping students, and the work offered financial stability, but he wanted flexibility to travel the country for estate sales and to build relationships with vendors. He decided to remain part-time.
Gage Goods launched in January 2020 as an online shop. Until then, he had sold rugs mostly in person — bringing them into people’s homes so they could see how each one fit their space.
But officially launching the business wasn’t easy. In the first five months, he lost $5,000 as travel and major purchases added up fast. “Oh man. I mean, it wasn’t a profitable business,” he says.
But he kept going. His growing expertise helped — he could quickly identify authentic rugs at estate sales. And he wasn’t doing it alone. One of his former English students in Tokat had begun sourcing rugs for him.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic. By May, Gage’s temporary position at Notre Dame was coming to an end with no renewal option due to the University’s hiring freeze. “I was like, ‘Oh, God. So either I move back home with Mom and Dad, or Gage Goods becomes a profitable business.’”
Before his last day at Notre Dame, he bought a Sprinter van. While his friend’s basement remained home base for the next 18 months, he spent the winter of 2020-21 living out of his van, crisscrossing the country to find rare books to sell. “Which is less sexy than Turkish rugs, but it was still an important aspect of Gage Goods,” he explains.
He stacked rugs and books beneath his loft bed in the back of the van. Solar panels charged a portable battery so he could camp in national forests; he lived off five-gallon water jugs while listing his inventory online. And although he was selling multiple rugs and about 100 books a week, stuff began piling up.
“I was just so sick of having to jump over rugs,” he says.
That August, he bought a house in South Bend. And any time he heard of a good sale, he’d pack up the van and hit the road. While scouting locations to photograph rugs for his online business — a series that paired each one with a local building built the same year it was woven — Gage and his photographer were driving down Sample Street on the city’s west side when they slowed in front of The Complex.
Noticing the wall of windows, they parked and peered inside a large, unused space. They went in and found a woman to talk to. The place was not only available, but it was “very South Bend,” Gage says. The Sample Street Business Complex was a former Torrington Company machine bearing factory shuttered in 1984. The property is now administered by the quasi-governmental Urban Enterprise Association of South Bend as a business incubator.
Gage moved his rugs into a 2,700-square-foot warehouse space in October 2021. Within a few months, even that space started to feel small. He had accumulated all kinds of items to make product photos pop — furniture, plants, props — and soon his sister Emma had an idea: Open the warehouse to the public. Sell the overflow. Even if the space was messy, people might come.
They did come, browsing and buying and asking when the next sale would be. “I guess next month,” he’d say. And since spring 2022, Gage has hosted a sale more or less every month.
The warehouse vibe of Gage’s sales hasn’t changed much since the early days. They’re designed more like parties than a typical sale, with ideas generated during the weekly dinners he hosts at his house.
“If there is a vibe that I want to be cultivating, so to speak, it would just be, ‘What’s a good party look like? What’s a good party feel like? And how can we make that experience happen?’”
Each sale is personal. Gage writes descriptions for every piece he can, telling stories about where items are from, how they were made, when, and by whom.
“There are things in here I only understand because of my education,” he says. “People know I’m not just a reseller — I care deeply about this stuff. I feel a sense of responsibility for the history behind these goods. That’s not something I’d have if I hadn’t studied theology at Notre Dame.”
I once spotted a large church hymn board placed near a pew, but the collection isn’t all religious. My favorite area is the cluster of small rugs at the shop’s center — the “practice rugs” depicting crocodiles and tigers and tufted with bright colors. An Afghan war rug appeared on the same rack, detailed with tanks and bombs. I’ve happened across antique Swiss cowbells, a container filled with hundreds of Soviet pins, antique vases from Vietnam, evil-eye pendants, handmade takke caps and Turkish patiks — footwear that hovers, Gage says, “somewhere between sock and house slipper.” As he half-joked on Instagram, these are treasures for anyone whose taste in home décor leans toward “early 20th-century archaeological expedition.”
He’s noticed a pattern: “The pieces that don’t sell after a few months are the ones with just a price tag. The things that sell are the things that I can — even if really quickly — tell a story about.”
Before each sale, at least one friend shows up to help. Ellis Riojas ’21 is a regular. “There’s an internal chaos that has to get out,” Riojas says, “and all his [endeavors] reflect that genuine restlessness, but also his desire to make things that bring people together.”
Trevor Stump, born in South Bend, returned home from a few years in Chicago looking for community. His friends pointed him to Gage Goods. Now, he attends those weekly dinners and helps out at the sales. “I think [the sales] are just this natural personified extension of Evan himself. It’s a little chaotic. There’s always a million different things going on, but there’s an amount of very tangible intentionality behind everything in there and with Evan himself.”
Gage is always experimenting. He doesn’t advertise traditionally — not by design, he insists, but it’s become part of his signature. He doesn’t think people show up just for the rugs, anyway.
“When you invite friends over for a pizza, it’s not about the pizza. When you invite friends over to watch a movie, it’s not about the movie. It’s always about everything. And the thing that I like about people that understand rugs is that they tend to be people that understand that one’s experience of a place is polyvalent,” he says.
“Sometimes I forget it even started as a rug store,” Gage’s friend Gabrielle Schulte says. “It’s grown into something so much bigger — it’s become the heart of a community. A place where you feel seen, known and loved.”
After a painful breakup and simultaneous job loss in Indianapolis, Schulte moved to South Bend seeking a fresh start. When she reached out to Gage, he called his friends to move her things, let her store them in his warehouse, gave her his van, helped her rebuild.
Schulte describes Gage’s store as a reflection of his spirit — “messy, whimsical, generous and deeply human.” She didn’t intend to stay in South Bend, but the community Gage built changed that. She now sees it as home. “Maybe South Bend doesn’t need a rug store,” she says. “But South Bend absolutely needs an Evan.”
One Friday night at Gage’s house, more than 20 guests squeezed around a table built for 10, knees bumping, chairs borrowed from every corner of the house, the room lit entirely by candlelight. The meal began with two prayers and a lengthy Moby Dick reading — the first of several.
The rules of Gage’s dinner parties are simple and unconventional. RSVPs are discouraged. No apologies for missing a night. Spouses can’t sit together during the meal. And if you attend more than one, you’re expected to cook for the group eventually.
Several people at the table that night had never met Gage in person, but a friend had invited them. “Here’s the thing,” he explains, “once you’re invited in a single time, you’re invited forever. . . . As a matter of fact, once you’re invited, you’re deputized to invite whoever you want.”
A guest book chronicles every gathering since these dinners began at Hillsdale in 2013: who brought what meal and a list of attendees who each signed their own names. These days, the invitation list has grown to more than 100 people. Many regularly attend.
After dinner, Gage served Turkish tea in the traditional way: a sugar cube, a splash of strong tea, then boiling water. As people sipped, they shared their triumphs and failures from the previous week — a “Friday Night Dinner” staple.
Stump described officiating a wedding for the first time — but forgetting to have the couple exchange rings. Aoife-Marie Buckley, a curatorial fellow at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art whose poetry about rugs is displayed in Gage Goods, announced the publication of her first book. There was clapping, laughter, storytelling.
Cleanup is quick and communal, then there’s dessert and a game. The games vary each week, but each one is designed with intention — a way to help people know each other better, to encourage deeper conversation and connection.
The idea is to provide “a place to be — and a place not to be,” ensuring a solitary Friday night is chosen freely, not forced by circumstance.
At first, these dinners weren’t meant to solve anything. Gage just liked the idea of people gathering, eating, being together. “Turkish people seem to get what it means to have community,” he says. “And I think we get propagandized into believing that we can’t have community as adults in America. That’s very silly.”
Then in 2015 he attended a talk given by Kallistos Ware, an English bishop of the Greek Orthodox church, who spoke of a 20th-century Orthodox saint — St. Maria Skobtsova — whose radical hospitality was rooted in one question: Did you welcome the stranger? Ware wondered aloud whether the deepest hunger in affluent societies wasn’t for food but for human connection.
“And I had this moment,” Gage says. “It was like these two streams running together. I hadn’t set out to solve anything. But I realized, maybe what we’re doing with the dinners is actually what Christ commanded: making a place for people to belong. To not feel excluded. To know they have a literal seat at the table.”
“What he is endeavoring to participate in is a mutual self-offering. He’s opening his home to you, and we all have permission to be vulnerable here,” Katelin Morey says. “Everybody is welcome every single time, and we will be accepted for all our flaws, for all our shortcomings. Not one of us is perfect, and we’re not really here to be in the game of pretending that we are. It all comes back to just helping people know that they are, in fact, welcome here.”
At his shop and in his home, Gage doesn’t just gather goods — he gathers people. Sometimes those people are alive. Sometimes, they aren’t.
“There’s this gal,” he says, whom he got to know while sorting through her things at an estate sale after her death. “I think about her a lot, weirdly. She had this crazy library — philosophy books, church historians, a big text of The Imitation of Christ.
“I remember at one point I found her collection of holy cards. I still have them here. Pinned to each one of the cards was an obituary for a friend — often of the same name as the saint on the holy card. Who was this chick reading Lacan and also Thomas à Kempis, who loved her friends?”
He pauses.
“I think it’s that — it’s like the communion of the living with the dead. That was something that the study of theology enabled me to recognize. And that, weirdly, I see as this kind of binding thing. Some of these rugs were made by people that are dead, and the stories that they have to tell are human stories that we can relate to and understand. And there is this tremendous beauty in beholding how a person so unlike you in so many ways can tell a story that is so immediately recognizable.”
The woman’s name was Sally. She had candelabras and Waterford crystal beer glasses and a garage wall lined with devotional candles.
Gage found her obituary. “It talks about how her beloved husband had died like 20 years before. She was this part of the community. And she had a jet ski that she called ‘Mom.’ You know what I mean?”
He laughs. “And every Friday night now, we have our dinners to the light of Sally’s candelabra. And to me — is this not, on some level, the cult of the saints? I mean, I get it. A weird thing. But I’ve had the chance to meet these incredible people.”
And when he thinks about the rugs, the dinners, the goods that carry a person’s story — his mind turns to the end of all things.
“When Christ teaches on [the end times], often it’s likened to a wedding feast,” Gage says. “It’s a dinner party. The end of the world is a dinner party. And everyone’s invited.”
Michelle Cuneo is an associate editor of this magazine.