RACINE COUNTY - From her office desk tucked behind an empty kitchen, Delilah Souter explains why she runs her business out of a residential home.

The building, a nondescript house behind a wall of trees and a rusty mailbox on 7500 Durand Ave., was supposed to be the newest home that her firm, Graceful Aging, Inc., would open for elderly people with Alzheimer's disease and other cognitive disabilities.

She used to work in the basement of another of her homes in Sturtevant, but her client list grew so quickly that her neighbors called a town hall meeting to address the traffic she was causing, she says with booming, breathy laughs punctuating her sentences. "I was kind of like a nuisance to the

neighborhood."

So House No. 7 became business headquarters.

Souter started Graceful Aging in 2007 while working as a nurse at Wheaton Fransican-All Saints hospital and at Pleasant Prairie's Grand Prairie Health and Rehabilitation Center, with a plan to offer more personal care to people who might otherwise be in a hospital or nursing home.

Two years later, Graceful Aging employs 62 people and provides round-the-clock care for 24 clients in six homes in Racine, Caledonia, Sturtevant, Mount Pleasant and Georgetown. On Tuesday, Souter was in Madison to accept a Governor's Trailblazer Award for Women in Business.

The business part of her job began when she was at All Saints and Grand Prairie. "I loved both, but I hated both, too, if that makes any sense," she says. She enjoyed nursing, but thought that elderly people could do much better than to be poked and prodded at a hospital, or sent to a nursing home, where people often are put in double rooms with roommates they don't get to choose.

"We treat the person, we don't treat the disease," Souter says of Graceful Aging. At her homes, residents get their own room - except for one double - and get to decide whether they like their housemates enough to move in. Staffers offer to take clients out to the movies, dinner and the supermarket.

Rodger Visek, 56, takes a simple joy from living at a Graceful Aging home: "When I get up in the morning, I can go out and have my smoke."

He pats his pocket, then pulls out a packet of full-flavored Basic cigarettes. At previous nursing homes, Visek wasn't allowed to carry cigarettes, and had to ask staffers if he could have one. At this one-story yellow home at 1800 Shoop St., Racine, Visek can go out to the porch and smoke when he wants. When he runs out, staffers will take him to get more.

At another home a block away, at 1924 Summit Ave., 99-year-old Leora McGlown and 75-year-old Nancy Shenkenberg sit quietly as "Law and Order" plays in the background. A staffer notes that often residents don't take the offers of movies and other outdoor activities, but McGlown and Shenkenberg don't seem to mind. "It's so homey," Shenkenberg says of the place, where she's lived for two years.

Souter estimates that she wouldn't have half the homes she owns if not for two microloans. In 2007, she went to US Bank to get a loan. She was told she didn't yet qualify, but there was a place that might be able to help: the Wisconsin Women's Business Initiative Corporation, which provides loans to women who might not otherwise get them. WWBIC gave her $40,000 initially, and then an additional $50,000 to help her expansion in 2008. Souter says it costs between $25,000 and $30,000 to open a new residence.

"When I started, Delilah was all I heard about," said Heather Lux, project director for WWBIC's southeast office, who started in September 2008.

"She was our success story for the southeast," she added.

Souter made a profit off of her first two homes by December 2008, and says with certainty that she'll be making an overall profit by the end of this year.

"Unless I decide to open more homes," she says.