Business: Art & Decor at Surf City
Owner: Nita Shapiro, 62, of Ship Bottom, and Connie Beggs, of Barnegat Light
Location: 1715 Long Beach Blvd., Surf City
Started: 2007
Employees: Consignor staffing
Phone: 609-494-5038
Art & Decor at Surf City offers artwork and accessories for the home, from furniture to functional pottery, Lazy Susans, photography and sculptures for the walls, area rugs, you name it. We run the gamut.
Everything here is handmade. Everything is created by our artists, and there are a lot of one-of-a-kind pieces.
We have more than 60 artists, whose works fill the 12 rooms of Art & Decor at Surf City. You walk from room to room and view the little vignettes set up by the artists.
We have artists who rent space from us, and artists who exhibit works on consignment and we take a commission from them.
Our offerings are very eclectic. We have a lot of shore items but also items from all over. You can get a wall piece from $99 up to $375, perhaps something in stained glass or a dimensional wall piece.
Functional pottery pieces start at $10 and go up to $40.
Connie Beggs, my partner, takes phenomenal photos of the island and from her travels abroad. Hundreds of her works are on display, priced from $35 to $250.
People could easily spend an hour or 45 minutes walking around our huge store.
Furniture varies from hand-painted to inlaid to mosaic tops to distressed. We have mostly tables, chairs, lamps and occasional pieces.
We also offer custom upholstery. People bring in their old chairs and we’ll take them apart and put new covers on them.
We open in April and stay open through December. We did phenomenally as soon as we opened in April, and July and August will be unreal.
We also offer art classes every day. An artist teaches mosaics, another how to make wall hangings.
Entry: I had my own business for 30 years as a home decor designer and artist. I still do that and a lot of custom work.
Connie and I always sold work at shows and we met up and decided to do this.
We started out with one little room. As we kept growing, we took over the whole building.
The overhead is very low because we’re not buying anything. Everyone brings their own pieces and every year there are new things. We have a waiting list for artists who want to be here.
