Pittsburg Interiors
Building a future.
Earlier this year, Pittsburg Interiors hosted a ribbon cutting for its new addition, now offering a beautiful 35,000 square foot showroom. It was the latest milestone in a story full of success, hard work, and family values.
It’s also a really cool story about two people who probably never should have met. The fact that owners Patty and Tim McNair met and fell in love at Pitt State is quite something.
Now this is a story all about how their lives (and a lot of furniture) got flipped-turned upside down.
While Patty was becoming the one of the first women at Cherokee High School to take woodshop class, he was building furniture 1,400 miles away in small town Montana. The odds of their paths crossing aren’t good at this point.
“I wanted to be in furniture making,” Tim said, “and at the time there weren’t that many schools that offered it. There was a school in Pittsburg, Kansas and one in North Carolina. The one in Kansas was about 1,000 miles closer, so I went with that one.”
Ok, well the odds just got a little better.
Patty and Tim met in PSU’s Cabinet and Furniture Making class. Tim thought Patty was “cute”, and Patty knew Tim was likely on the lookout for a steady girl.
“The women who grew up in Tim’s hometown didn’t often go back once they left,” Patty said. “So Tim knew he had to get a woman while he was down here.”
(She was half-joking.)
Both loved working with their hands. Building things. Making things. Furniture. Upholstery. They both loved hard work. And, just four months into the program, they both knew they wanted to be together for a really long time.
They opened their first business together in 1980. It was a little upholstery shop inside the Stillwell Hotel in Downtown Pitt. Shortly after, they married and decided to move back to Montana.
“We had $1,200, a sewing machine, and a car,” Tim said.
That’s where the real fun began.
Together they opened McNair’s Furniture, first inside his dad’s garage, then later in a proper building space. Between furniture upholstery and flooring, the business took off. Just a few years after opening, Tim was named one of the top 100 carpet salesmen in the nation.
“About five years into it, we grossed over a million dollars in a town of just over 300 people,” Patty said.
After 17 years of success in Montana, the McNairs sold the business to its employees in 1998. And headed back south.
“We didn’t quite know what we’d do once we got to Pittsburg,” Tim said. “We moved here to be closer to Patty’s family.”
Then after a few discussions and some research into the furniture and flooring scene, Tim saw an opportunity.
“I went to Patty and said, ‘There’s business here. Let’s do it.’”
Pittsburg Interiors opened in December 1999 on the southern edge of Pittsburg. The location was chosen both for the space and the connection to surrounding cities.
“To do what we wanted to do, we’d need to have a lot of semis in and out of here,” Tim said. “Trying to do that downtown is a nightmare. We needed room for trucks. We also liked this spot because it’s a thoroughfare for places like Parsons and Joplin.”
Through recession, the opening of big box stores nearby, the pandemic, and everything in between, Pittsburg Interiors continued to grind and grow.
“It’s all about hard work,” Tim said. “If you work hard, you’ll survive.”
With a strong reputation for quality and customer service, the flooring component of the business became their bread and butter. Then during the Covid pandemic, furniture really took off.
“People were staying home,” Patty said. “They started working from home and started to really take a second look at their homes. Furniture became very popular during the pandemic.”
The key component to their success over the past 24 years has been the support of the community.
“Pittsburg is a really special place because of how much the business community supports each other,” Patty said. “We have a really strong Chamber, and that also helps a lot.”
And, of course, the most important part is family. Today, the McNairs’ two children, Macon and Timbrelee, work at Pittsburg Interiors and plan to oversee its management and growth as its founders begin considering retirement.
“Family values has always been at the core of what we do here,” Timberlee said, “and it’s really quite special to be able to work here at this place our parents started. We couldn’t be more proud of how hard our parents have worked and all they’ve put into this business and community.”
