When someone asks me what I consider the best nursery in the Hamptons, my answer is Marders in Bridgehampton.

I look at places the same way I look at our candles. I look for care. I look for organization. I look for the feeling that somebody is paying attention. The finish, the layout, the service, the cleanliness, the way something is presented, the way a customer is made to feel. All of it speaks, and it speaks before anyone does.

Marders has that feeling.

Marders sits on forty acres. A nursery this size could easily be chaotic. Marders is the opposite. Each little area is a nursery within the nursery. There is room to walk, room to slow down, room to stand in front of a tree and picture it in your own yard. Paths run the length of the property, and they do something quietly clever. They guide you as you imagine the beautiful collection in your home. The rows are crisp. The sections make sense. The place is fully alive in peak season but honestly it feels very comfortable to come in and daydream about your home.

Our warehouse in Westhampton Beach has the control that I feel affects the way the customer feels when they receive our candles. When a space is disorganized, I feel we can not make decisions. On the other hand, when a space is well arranged and organized, you can clearly imagine about what is in front of you. You study the leaf. You imagine your home and how a plant might live in it. In the end, that is what matters most. That was my first clear impression of Marders: somebody here is paying attention. I believe our production facilities be it our candle production or the nursery, organized facilities make the best experiences the customer feels.

Offering unique experiences with unique products is what I look for in other businesses. We have focused Thompson Ferrier to be just that. When I find a brand or business that follows our process, naturally I gravitate towards it. At Marders, the trees are not stock. They are specimens, giant, rare, decades in the making. When you visit the property, you can easily tell that Marders has large mature trees in large scale with some tree roots larger than the road. Walking the property, I notice very rare and unique collections. That excites me.

That is how I think about the candles we make. A candle should be present in the room. It should be the thing the room is arranged around, the object your eye returns to, the one people ask about. A specimen tree does that outdoors. Our Buddha Royale Collection does it indoors, hand-sculpted, singular, made to be the center of decor rather than a detail in it. The rarest things are never the ones you find everywhere. That is true of a tree, and it is true of what you choose to bring home.

I walk through a place like this differently than most people. Fragrance is my life's work, and gardening is my private one, so a wall of flowers is my fragrance exploration in the real world. Its my live library that I can smell not in oil form. I loved the floral selection at Marders. It wasn’t the same flowers I see at every nursery. My love affair with Gardenia is known to all of you and I grow them myself. I know its scent better than almost any other, the creaminess, the green edge underneath, the way it turns heavier and sweeter as it opens. To smell it growing, in soil, in the open air, is a different thing entirely from smelling it in a bottle.

That flower is the reason our White Buddha exists. We built it around French gardenia, orange blossom and freesia, layered until it breathes the way the real bloom does rather than simply smelling of it. Standing in Marders, surrounded by the living version, I understood again why we chose it. Marders grows the flower I love. I spent years learning how to keep it.

Step inside the barn and the visual temperature of the whole place changes. The walls and ceiling are warm wood, the light is low and golden, and the objects are not stacked to sell, they are arranged the way you would arrange your own home. It is the rare shop where you slow down instead of scanning, because someone clearly cared where every object landed. The best part is that when I focus on one area, its so well curated, that I actually stay focused on that thought in that area and can make a decision without erratic distraction. I love that kind of shopping.

That is exactly how we think about what we make. Lighting a candle is a ritual. Only when done right, can a candle command your calm, place you in a mood of relaxation, naturally apply its fragrances in the room to affect you. Our White Elephant was built for exactly that kind of quiet. Its Neroli Eucalyptus fragrance opens with bitter orange and eucalyptus, settles into neroli and lavender, and rests on orange blossom and sandalwood.

Every Sunday, Marders holds a Garden Talk. People come to learn, to stand among the plants and listen to someone who knows them, to ask the questions they have been saving. It is free, and that tells you something. A business that gives its knowledge away on a Sunday morning is a business that wants a relationship, not a transaction. You do not build that with a sale. You build it by showing up, week after week, for the people who care about what you do.

I understood that instantly, because it is the same thing we try to do in our own way. We go live on TikTok to talk to the people who love our candles, to answer questions, to show the work, to simply be present with them. The brands and places that last are not the ones that shout the loudest. They are the ones that keep showing up, that treat their audience as a community rather than a market.

Marders feels prestige in a way that belongs to the Hamptons, but the sophistication is never the point it is making. It is the working reality of a nursery, soil and carts and labor, carrying the refinement of a place that holds itself to a standard. Both things at once. That is harder than it sounds. Most places pick one.

What you feel underneath all of it is that the business knows exactly who it is. A business that treats people like people. Marder staff are one of the best cordial staff I have ever met in this environment. That kind of confidence is unique, and it is contagious. When a place is that sure of what it is, you trust it, and you relax into it, and you start to believe your own taste is in good hands.

If there is one thing that Thompson Ferrier is known to focus on is its customer. We have made it clear that our attention is never invested into competition or other brands. We believe that our consistent attention to our customer is our one and only North Star. Every decision we make ask the following question: Is this good for our customer? Our decision are made based on the answer.

The buildings at Marders are not the afterthought they are at most nurseries. They are the reason the place feels like somewhere rather than something. The Garden Shop sits inside a 19th-century barn, wooden floors, old light, the kind of character you cannot build new or order from a catalog. Around it, the structures feel considered rather than assembled, placed on the land instead of dropped onto it. You do not walk into a store. You walk into a world that was made on purpose.

Standing among it, the ordinary line between outside and inside disappears, the barn feels like part of the garden, the garden feels like part of the barn, and you stop thinking of it as shopping at all.

The Marders have a line I have not stopped thinking about. They build gardens, they say, for a world too full of sameness. That is not a tagline to me or even them, but a worldview. The easy path in any business is the copy of the thing that already sells. The harder path, the only one worth taking, is to make something that did not exist before and trust that the right person will recognize it.

Marders does it with a nursery that refuses to look like every other nursery. We do it with candles that refuse to look like every other candle. Our Grand Icon Collection is the clearest proof of it, hand-sculpted forms, a Buddha, an elephant, shapes no one else is making, each one meant to be the single object a room remembers. Neither of us is trying to be for everyone. We are trying to be unforgettable to someone. That is the whole difference, and it is why I felt at home the moment I walked in.

I have been going to Marders for years, and it still does the same thing to me every time. It reminds me why I care about the details. So if you find yourself out east, go, walk the paths slowly, sit in the barn, stand in front of the gardenia and understand why I love it.

When you want to feel that same care indoors, come find us. We are a few miles west in Westhampton Beach. Make an appointment by emailing raffi@thompsonferrier.com or DM us on Instagram and stop by the warehouse to smell your favorite fragrances in person.

Until next time,

— Raffi