Finished work a silent recommendation
“Eventually we’re going to put up a sign by the road, but it’s the finished work that’s still on the property which sells us,” said Rob, who had to break off the interview briefly to attend to a prospective customer who pulled into the parking area behind the wheel of a late-model luxury sedan.
The prosperous-looking gray-haired driver wanted an estimate on cedar garden fencing, a popular inquiry, said Davis. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly easy to come up with a price on spec, since designs vary in terms of intricacy, and there are the usual variables of height and so forth. This year, an average fencing job for Romancing The Woods is for about ten yards at an average cost of $85 per linear foot, according to Davis. But the price can range from $65 to $110 per foot, depending on the style the customer selects.
“We don’t do craft fairs,” said Rob. “I tried the craft fair (circuit). We had lots of people come by and say nice things but we didn’t get a single sale.”
Unlike most small upstate businesses, Romancing The Woods has a fairly elaborate and up-to-date web site, which Rob designed mostly himself. He made his company’s Internet presence a top priority when he bought the business, and that’s really paid off for him. Unlike many master craftsmen, Davis is unusually competent with digital technology.
“It’s really embarrassing, but when I was growing up, my brothers and sisters called me ‘Computer Bobby,’” said Davis, wincing. “I had help with writing some of the code, but yeah, creating our company web site was one of the first things I did when I bought the business.”
For a while, the company had one of those white plastic removable letter stand-alone signs by the side of the road. Although relatively few customers actually originate from drive-bys, it’s been effective marketing to display near the road finished swings, benches, arbors, pergolas and gazebos. There’s also the company’s one and only dog house, known as the “Sugar Shack,” in which Davis’ miniature Dalmatian named for the cane sweetener typically spends most of the day.
Creating canine retreats isn’t likely to be a growth area for Romancing The Woods, said Davis, adding that to-date he’s had no requests.
“I love the idea but they’d be so expensive to build. To do what we do, you have to go out and cut a tree selectively, and then hand chisel and build everything from scratch,” he said. “We rarely use any glue, the furniture is all fastened together using four-inch ceramic-coated screws and galvanized lags.”
Romancing The Woods buys its screws from nearby Woodstock Building Supply and the lags, which look like really heavy-duty screws to the uninitiated, come from a supplier in Albany.
The most popular item Romancing The Woods sells are benches fashioned in the “romantic Adirondacks style, more or less,” said Davis. They cost between $650 and $850 depending on the size. A really nice bench-swing is about $3500 and a typical arbor is $1200.
“The former owner knew a lot more than I do about the art history side of building this style of garden furniture,” admits Davis, a college graduate who studied wood sculpture and other fine-arts crafts, mostly at the University of Hartford. “I’ve changed things a little, reinterpreted it.”
‘I can’t smell cedar anymore’
Romancing The Woods is always on the lookout for stands of Eastern Red Cedar, classified as a pioneer invader, which means that it’s one of the first tree species to repopulate former farmland, or forest burned down in a fire.
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