I have owner draw in quotes because yeah you cant change the underlying winforms control.. However you can use an overlay that is completely opaque to redraw over the group names. Therefore with the right events hooked up and logic you can draw them yourself. Just as a proof of concept I have implemented the overlay detecting group state changes, and control resizing. With this being a proof of concept, there are a lot of assumptions, and things not implemented like getting the height of the group...