Foot traffic outside one of the area’s newest furniture and architecture design studios in Pawtucket is not bad, after all the Two Ton Inc. office is located across from the U.S. Post Office building on Montgomery Street.
With their catchy name and commitment to becoming more available to area residents and businesses, the company’s owners, Peter Benarcik and Luke Mandle, have nothing but great expectations for the future.
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The company was founded in 2004 and offers a design studio, gallery space and fabrication shop.
“We had worked together in San Francisco for just under five years in a similar design office and decided to start our own business, there was a draw for us to come back to the East Coast,” Benarcik said, adding that he’s originally from Delaware and Mandle is from Rhode Island.
“We decided to move out here and found the perfect building for us. We decided to use the building just what the building was there for: a design studio, gallery space and fabrication shop,” Benarcik said.
According to Mandle, before starting their company in Rhode Island, he and Benarcik looked into setting up a business in San Francisco, but after evaluating the costs, they decided to move to the state offering greater benefits. Both men have an extensive background working in San Francisco, the Napa Valley and other West Coast locations.
“In the course of looking for a place to lease in this area and a place to live, this building came up, it was listed as residential. We realized the numbers made sense for us to be able to buy the building and do something with it,” Mandle said.
They set out to transform the building, which at one time housed a motorcycle shop and was previously used as a storage facility by a local antiques dealer. They crafted everything in the office space from light fixtures to metalwork, walls and staircases.
“The idea of having our own office space is something that allows us to have a space to bring clients and show them what our aesthetic is and how we look at design,” Mandle said.
Mandle and Benarcik say the bulk of their work now focuses on architectural projects for residential and commercial entities, among them working on a project in downtown Providence for the expansion of the Abode home furnishing store. However, their focus is also expanding to include the development of a new furniture line that would offer coffee tables, cabinetry, dressers, sofas, chairs and similar items.
While Two Ton would not make their products for direct sales, the company is looking into licensing their designs for production and manufacturing elsewhere.
“Our shop will allow us to prototype the products and study the forms and materials we’ll use, but we’ll be looking into licensing, which is basically selling our designs. We’d like to use local vendors for the manufacturing of the products, particularly since there are a lot of companies going overseas, we hope to have local companies do the work,” Benarcik said.
In addition to their furniture and architecture focus, Benarcik and Mandle provide a place in their office’s gallery space for area artists to showcase their work, a process that makes getting to know the community much easier.
“Another big aspect of this building is our non-traditional role as a design studio. We have gallery openings, host shows and we want our space to be used by everyone in the general public to see art and design and various other aspects other than the traditional architectural office model,” Benarcik said.
According to Mandle, one thing that makes Two Ton unique is that both men have a lot of practical knowledge about what the building process is and how things go together.
Benarcik said, “We have a tradition of architecture and an understanding, but we also have a very different perspective of how architecture can be interpreted.”
As for the company’s name, Mandle said choosing a name to represent what the company stands for was no easy task.
“The name has to do mostly with the duality of our practice, the partnership that we have, the fact that we’re a furniture and architecture design studio and that the process of our design is two dimensional and three dimensional (from computer to shop),” he said. “We also like the inherent sense of stability and solidity the name Two Ton evokes. Plus it’s a catchy, fun name that doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
