Short move, a world of difference for Hunt & Lane

For the past four years, Rehoboth Beach’s Hunt & Lane has been located in a Wilmington Avenue storefront. When owners Taber and Nadia Bartoshesky reopen their Indonesian-inspired furniture store for the season, they’ll still have a Wilmington Avenue storefront, but it will be in a new location.

It’s just a stone’s throw away, but will have double the space, said Taber during an April 2 interview. The old location worked great for a first store, but a lot of the pieces the store has to offer couldn’t be displayed because of space limitations, he said.

“The new space has so much more potential,” said Taber of the first-floor showroom, which will feature big, open windows and 14-foot-tall ceilings with exposed rafters.

A native of Salisbury, Md., Taber grew up surfing in Ocean City. As part of a surfer bucket-list adventure, he traveled to Indonesia, where he fell in love with the culture, crafts, textiles and furniture. Shortly after returning, he said, he had a shipping container from the island of Java sent stateside.

For a handful of years, the furniture business was Taber’s side gig, run out of his parents’ garage, later a commercial warehouse. He and Nadia opened the storefront in 2016, as one of the original tenants of the Avenue Inn & Spa expansion.

“I was still working in restaurants, with a 1-year-old daughter at the time. My wife wanted us to figure out what our next move was,” he said. “Our decision was, let's do this thing for real.”

Taber and Nadia, who is from Indonesia and has a marketing background working for Billabong in Bali, travel back to the islands every winter for inspiration.

He said they meet with furniture makers who are making products out of kiln-dried hardwoods like teak and mahogany.

The name Hunt & Lane is a combination of Taber’s middle name – Hunt – and the last name of his original business partner and friend, John Lane. The two are no longer in business together, but Taber said he wanted to keep the name because the business had a good following.

“Furniture wasn’t John’s passion. Business partnerships can go sour, but we’re still close, and he was flattered I wanted to keep the name,” said Taber. “Plus, I had already made a bunch of stickers and T-shirts, so there was no turning back.”

Taber said construction on the new space is coming along well. He said the plan was to open around Mother’s Day in early May, but with everything going on right now, it looks like it will be closer to Memorial Day.

“It’s OK. We opened our first brick-and-mortar location Memorial Day weekend five years ago, so the symmetry is good,” said Taber. “

Taber said when the store opens, the expected hours will be 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., daily. For more information on Hunt & Lane, 48 Wilmington Ave., go to www.huntandlane.com, call 443-614-3174 or email hello@huntandlane.com.