A hinge, a mill, and a river.
Murphy Door® started with one hidden door and the hardware to hang it. Fourteen years later the company that built that door owns the mill that supplied the wood, and the mill is Snake River Hardwoods.
This is a full circle. The first Murphy Door® products were designed and built with Kris Merrill's shop in Rigby, Idaho, more than thirteen years ago. In 2026 Murphy Door® bought that mill, kept the team, and gave it a name of its own. Snake River Hardwoods is where the wood comes from. Murphy Door® is where it goes.
It started with a hinge that did not exist.
Jeremy Barker was a career firefighter and paramedic who wanted a hidden bookcase door for his own home theater. Nobody sold one that worked, because no hinge on the market would carry a loaded bookcase for years without sagging. So he built the hinge himself, in a garage, on his days off, and ran the company between fire shifts until it could stand on its own.
By 2016 Murphy Door® had a shop in Ogden and a second one in Lexington, Kentucky. By 2017 it had a 40,000 square foot factory and its own milling department. The company has made the Inc. 5000 list seven times and took Best of IBS, Best Indoor Product, in 2022. More than 200,000 orders have shipped.
The people who built the first one.
Kris Merrill's hardwood shop on the Snake River helped design and build the very first Murphy Door® products. For thirty years that shop planed, molded and textured hardwood for the mountain West. In July 2026 Murphy Door® bought it: 22,500 square feet, every machine, and the whole team, who all stayed. Jeremy called it less an acquisition than coming home.
That mill is now Snake River Hardwoods. The same year, Ultra Shelf, the floating shelf and mantel maker, joined the family with its own factory and its own customers. Between the two, Murphy Door® went from buying hardwood to making it, finishing it, and selling it straight to the people who build with it.
Every hinge, every bracket, every bed frame. Made here.
Most companies in this category import their hardware and put a label on it. Murphy Door® used to buy its hardware from outside machine shops too. Now MD Machining, the company's own machine shop in Utah, builds all of it: the hinges and mechanical locks for every hidden door, the frames and lift hardware for every Murphy bed, and the steel brackets that hold every Ultra Shelf floating shelf to the wall. All of it made in the USA.
The shop runs CNC machines, tube lasers, laser and plasma cutters, robotic welders and benders, and lathes, and it takes on custom metal work for clients whose project needs a part that does not exist yet. The engineers who used to be outside consultants are now staff, working a problem from the first sketch to the finished piece.
Our wood rides on our trucks.
Murphy Door® runs its own freight line, MDIT. The fleet carries raw lumber into Rigby, finished siding and shelving out, and hardware and material between the plants. For Snake River Hardwoods customers that means delivery priced by the mile from the mill, a driver who works for us, and nobody handing your order to a third carrier halfway there.
Four places we work. One we are building toward.
We have bought buildings and land as we have grown, because owning the floor you build on is the only way to keep control of what happens on it. Here is where the work happens today.
Ogden, UT 84405Headquarters. Offices for every company in the family.
West Haven, UTDoor and wall bed plant, fully automated in 2024, and the MD Machining hardware shop.
Lexington, KYOffices and the eastern door plant, automated in 2025.
Rigby, IDSnake River Hardwoods. Hardwood milling, texturing and finishing. Acquired 2026.
Three hundred miles from the people we build for.
Hardwood is heavy. Doors are heavier. Every mile a finished product rides is cost, risk and time that the customer pays for one way or another. So the goal for the next few years is simple to say: a plant within about 300 miles of wherever our customers are densest. Utah and Idaho cover the mountain West. Kentucky covers the East. Dallas puts us in the middle of the country. Each one is a place we can mill, machine, build and deliver on our own trucks without the product ever leaving our hands.
Hidden doors still make it onto television and into attractions like the John Wick Experience at AREA15 in Las Vegas, and into bars, cellars and speakeasies that want a moment a phone cannot give you. But most of what we make now is quieter than that: siding on a house in the Tetons, a shelf in a kitchen, a bed that folds into a wall. The hinge is still the heart of it. The mill is where it grows from.
Part of a family of American manufacturers
Snake River Hardwoods is the hardwood mill of Murphy Door® Inc., milling textured hardwood, veneer, siding, and edgebanding in Rigby, Idaho, and shipping to all fifty states.