A molecular biologist and a woodworker walk into a shop…
Keefrider Custom Furniture is a workshop in Santa Barbara, California, led by Jay and Sirie Keefrider, working alongside a small team of shop assistants. We take on the builds other shops turn down. Not out of recklessness — there's very little the two of us haven't found a way to build right, and we love a challenge.
Jay has been designing and building furniture professionally for over twenty-five years. He started as a teenager, apprenticing under sculptor Jack Larimore in Philadelphia, then earned a BFA in Furniture Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design — consistently ranked among the top design schools in the country. He moved to California and founded Cotterpin Design Workshop in 2001, building custom furniture and special commissions for the film and music industries for a decade before Keefrider began in Santa Barbara in 2015. Jay is the reason other woodworkers call this shop when they're stuck on their own. His edge isn't any single technique — it's experience, imagination, and a bullheaded refusal to leave a problem half-solved. Our Iris Table is the clearest example of what that looks like in practice, but it comes through in all of our work.
Sirie came to woodworking sideways — thirteen years as a research scientist, a PhD in Molecular Biology from Yale, before trading her lab coat for a shop apron in 2015. Carving, inlay, and CNC work, she taught herself. Classical woodworking and joinery, she learned from Jay, over more than a decade in the shop together. She's known for the carving and inlay in pieces like the Kraken Table’s top inlay and carved dragon feet, the Guitar Desk inlay, or the Waterfall Table — but that's one part of what she does, not the whole of it.
We work mainly in hardwoods — FSC certified for sustainable forestry, and properly kiln dried. For an occasional element outside our own expertise, such as a complex metal table base, we'll bring in a trusted outside craftsperson. This is rare, maybe once a year, but if we think someone else can do it better, we’ll take that option.
We're selective: we thrive on a challenge, but if we don't believe we can build something to our standard, we won't take it on.
Come see the shop. We're happy to talk through what you're imagining — in person, if you're in Santa Barbara, or wherever you are.