Inside the Santa Barbara Workshop
Where Furniture Becomes Art
At Keefrider Custom Furniture,
Sirie and Jay Keefrider Combine
Woodworking, Engineering, and Artistry to
Create One-of-a-Kind Pieces
Story & photos by Elaine Sanders
September 3, 2026
Read more Home & Garden Fall 2026 stories here.
On Santa Barbara’s Eastside, a garage door is open. Inside, a band saw whirs, filling the air with the smell of sawdust as two woodworkers, a husband and wife, are hard at work.
Located on Reddick Street, Keefrider Custom Furniture studio is a space where clients can arrive with an idea and see that vision come to life. Sirie and Jay Keefrider are dedicated to creating completely custom pieces ranging from display cases to tables, made with sustainably sourced, premium materials. Using their complementary skill sets and their intense attention to detail, the couple has completed their most recent, and second iteration, of their extensively engineered, expandable, and round Iris table.
“We really love working with clients who are really interested in getting something special, you know, something unique,” said Sirie. “That’s generally when people come to us.”
The couple has created furniture that could be considered sculpture, including a desk modeled after a guitar with real guitar string inlay, an epoxy side table that looks like a river with backlighting to reveal little diver and dolphin figures, and their Iris table modeled after a mechanism patented in 1835.
Jay has been building for the past 25 years, completing a degree in furniture design from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2000. He worked in construction during the building boom in Savannah, built film sets in Hollywood, and opened his workshop, Cotterpin Design Custom Furniture and Woodworking, with a friend in Los Angeles before moving the operation to Santa Barbara in 2014.
Like many, UCSB drew the couple to Santa Barbara; after a PhD at Yale and research at UCLA, Sirie started a postdoc stem cell research program at the Neuroscience Research Institute. Always drawn to the arts — despite her art school dreams being stifled by her parents — and grappling with the beast that is academic research, she decided to put her brainpower toward creating beautiful physical objects full-time, rather than staring through a microscope or at a screen.
“I started working more and more on projects in the shop with Jay, and then I just was finally like, ‘This is where I want to be,’ ” said Sirie. She discovered a talent for carving and inlay designs, which she uses to embellish the pieces that Jay builds.
“I dabbled in carving, but I was never good at it,” said Jay. Sirie, on the other hand, “is great at it; her ability to take a 2D image and transform it, transfer it into 3D, is beyond my capability.”
Inside the Keefrieder workshop. | Credit: Elaine Sanders
The couple committed to their shared passion in 2015, changing the workshop’s name from Cotterpin to Keefrider, cementing the professional partnership and blending their skill sets six days a week. With Jay’s breadth of experience and Sirie’s aesthetic talents, “we can confidently say that we can build almost anything that comes in the door,” said Sirie.
Building pieces to last is inherent to the Keefriders’ design principles. Jay recalled working on film sets where “the real heartbreaking part for me was you’d spend three days transforming a blank location into whatever it was they’re looking for, and on that fourth day you’d come in, and your job was to tear it down and to put it in a dumpster.”
“Beautiful trees are taken down to produce the material that we use, and it’s important to us that we respect that and use it to the fullest,” said Sirie. She explained that they use strictly FSA-certified wood from sustainable sources, often working directly with farmers to ensure that their wood is produced ethically.
Their most recent creation is a culmination of one-and-a-half years of work. It is the second iteration of the Iris table, whose round top is separated into wedges that lift up, gently turn, and expand outward to create a table that starts at six feet in diameter and extends to eight feet. When in motion, “it almost sounds like a rain stick,” said Jay, with the optical-grade metal swing arms and 24 vertical bearings engineered to gently move the slabs of black walnut precisely into place.
An art moving company was hired to package the table in pieces, with nine custom-built crates sent to the client’s Utah home filled with all the components of the moving masterpiece. The Keefriders flew out and assembled the piece themselves in the dining room, underneath a crystal deer-antler chandelier complementing Sirie’s aspen turn stag-head inlay on the tabletop.
The couple is currently building a third Iris table for a client in Colorado, and continues to work on various one-of-a-kind pieces, including a nautical-themed writing desk, designed for their clients and built to last for generations.
“It’s stressful because you’re almost always building something that you’ve never built before,” said Jay. “But it’s also really rewarding, and it keeps us interested in coming in every day.”
For more information, see keefridersb.com.
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