Tucked away on a pretty stretch of road in Wading River, R.E.N. Design Company is a quintessential mom-and-pop operation.
The shop’s owners, Jason and Samantha Nagorski, estimate that they know about half of the people who stop in on any given day. And it’s not unusual to catch a glimpse of the couple’s 7-year-old daughter Ruby buzzing around the sales floor on roller skates. Ruby also has the distinction of serving as the store’s muse, having graciously lent the initials of her full name (Ruby Elizabeth Nagorski) to the R.E.N. Design moniker.
But don’t let the quaint location and charming store-naming story fool you: The Nagorskis are serious craftspeople. And they’ve mastered the yin and yang of custom woodwork and design.
Samantha, whose background is in graphic design, photography and painting, usually conceptualizes the projects and draws them up. Jason does the vast majority of the construction. A self-described skater kid, he took a gig with a custom cabinet maker straight out of high school 20 years ago and never looked back, gradually transforming himself into a master woodworker.
Jason is a bit of an enigma. He’s part man-child, a guy who built himself a motorized skateboard and is routinely spotted cruising around Wading River and as far afield as Port Jefferson 10 miles away.
“I don’t do tricks anymore,” he says a little wistfully, adding that at 37 years old, he doesn’t feel safe pushing his board to its top speed anymore.
Jason is also every inch the discerning artisan – though you have to work to get him to admit it.
He tends to think about his craft in a way that can feel reductive and excessively modest. The furniture he and Samantha create for a demanding clientele is unique and often quite stunning – particularly their dining tables. But Jason is quick to minimize what he brings to the projects.
“I don’t have that vision,” he says. “Samantha has that. I don’t have whatever that creative thing is. I need a lot of points of reference.”
“I consider myself more of a tradesman or a builder,” he adds. “I’ll see other people who do woodwork, and I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s art; there’s something pouring out of your soul there.’ I don’t necessarily see my work that way.”
Not surprisingly, Samantha, his partner of 18 years, doesn’t fully agree with Jason’s assessment. “I see what he does every day,” she says. “So it’s wild to me that he thinks that way.”
While Jason won’t acknowledge that he was born with a special gift – a feel for the wood that other people simply don’t have – he will very grudgingly flash just a hint of ego.
“I wasn’t born with talent,” he insists. “I learned a skill. But I will say I’m the best at that skill.” While they may disagree a bit on the nature of creativity and talent, Samantha and Jason have been collaborating successfully for a long time.
In fact, the couple’s creative partnership started fairly early in their relationship, years before they conceived of a full-time gig designing and making furniture and home accessories.
When her sister was expecting a child, Samantha drew up plans for a custom bassinet for her soonto- be-arriving niece. Jason built it out of maple. “It was probably the first real thing I built that wasn’t a cabinet,” he says.
The bassinet was so well received by friends and family that it led to more projects. About five years later, R.E.N. Design Company was born, right around the time the couple gave birth to their daughter Ruby.
“Having our daughter pivoted us and made us want to get out of the rat race,” Samantha explains. The couple were both working full-time and running a side business renting vintage photo booths (several of which Jason built himself) for weddings and events.
The first few years after the store opened, Samanatha worked there full-time, but Jason kept his custom cabinet-making job and did work for the fledgling business on nights and weekends. Then in 2020, around the time the pandemic hit, he switched to full-time work at the store.
Having worked a full-time job while juggling multiple side hustles since high school, Jason thinks of his current situation as a relatively serene chapter in his life. As the co-owner of a growing business and the father of a young daughter, there are still plenty of demands on his time. But in Jason’s case, the old adage that says if you do what you love. you’ll never work a day in your life is particularly resonant.
“I’m only 37 but I feel like I’m retired,” he says. “I walk to work; 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. is a normal day for me, but it doesn’t feel like I’m working for 14 hours. I still love woodworking and I still love what I do.”
Samantha and Jason agree that as demanding as their day-to-day lives can be, their biggest source of stress happens when they deliver a custom order to their clients.
“You go over everything with a customer, they’ve made all the decisions, it’s built to the specs they asked for – hopefully we’ve been able to pull out what they were imagining in their head,” Samantha says. “But there’s always this level of uncertainty. Will they love it? Will they love what we spent all this time putting our blood, sweat and tears into?”
Samantha reports that with almost no exceptions, the couple’s customers are usually thrilled with their furniture. “You can’t beat the natural high you get when you create something that people love,” she says.
Samantha estimates that about 60 percent of the couple’s business comes from custom furniture design 20 percent from direct retail sales at the shop and 20 percent from crafts parties she hosts at the store a few times a month on Friday nights.
“I live a lot in the gift world,” she notes.
The workshops, which usually consist of about 20 women building, painting and decorating one of Samantha’s creations, can last anywhere from 2.5 to 4 hours. Attendees love the fact that when the evening ends, they get to leave with a unique handmade decoration or objet d’art.
Though a good portion of their custom design business comes from word of mouth, Samantha and Jason have a lively social media presence to help spur growth, often chronicling the progress of larger custom projects online. As all small business owners who don’t have the luxury of a dedicated social media person on staff know, feeding Instagram and Facebook with regular content updates requires a major commitment.
“Sometimes a project can take me twice as long just because of the time it takes to make the social media videos,” Jason laments.
Putting aside the success of their company and the obvious quality of the furniture and home accessories they create, Samantha and Jason are one of those couples who have managed to strike what feels like a very comfortable work-life balance.
“If we won the lottery, we would still have this place,” Jason says, and Samantha nods in agreement.
This article appears in the August 16, 2024, issue of Behind The Hedges inside Dan’s Papers. Read the full digital version of the magazine here. For previous Master Craftsman columns, click here.
