As it was late, Sergei Ponomaryov offered to drive me home to the other side of Moscow after our interview. Driving across the city is really nothing to him, who once traveled from Moscow to Sakhalin Island by train, without money. Back then, passengers who boarded the train as it crossed the country wondered why this Moscow Architecture Institute student and his friends would undertake such a lengthy and seemingly senseless journey. Like a real romantic, Ponomaryov said that they were doing it just for the fun of it.

Today, Ponomaryov doesn’t spend his days in trains. He has settled down a bit, is developing his business as a maker of built-in furniture and sees the company that makes the furniture for the Kremlin as his main competitor.

"The ordinary consumer prefers us over the other company," Ponomaryov says. "What they do for $50,000, we do for $25,000. They are not so much competitors as a supplier of clients.

"People come to us and explain what they want, and we name a price. They think, ‘Oh, that’s too expensive’ and go to the competitors, who name a price that is twice as high, and then they come back to us."

Ponomaryov began his business in the early 1990s. "I come from a family of architects and had studied at the Moscow Architecture Institute," he said. "At some point, though, I realized that I didn’t want to be an architect. I wouldn’t be a good one and didn’t want to be a bad one."

That was when he decided to do something else constructive. He says that he began by sticking up notices around town saying that he would make or repair furniture.

"I’d like to forget my first customer," he recalls. "It was a woman who saw one of my notices and asked me to make a cabinet that she could use to cover the radiator. I found boards at a construction site, got some old tools from my father and made the cabinet in our Moscow kitchen. Needless to say, the quality was wanting. But when I took it to her, she said that it was quite good. Later, however, her husband called me, and I won’t tell you what he said, but the main idea was that they would not be needing my services again."

But that was just his first try, and Ponomaryov has no such problems today. The clients have changed, too – these days, they are not people off the street, but people working in the oil business. And he has proper tools now and no longer needs to scrounge boards from construction sites.

He says that there is a constant flow of orders for the business. "We finish one order and immediately start work on another," he says. A big change from the days when Ponomaryov and his then-business partner, Sergei Andreyev, now in Germany, were without work or money.

"When we first went sticking up notices, we had a lot of clients: People wanting something repaired or something made," he said. "Andreyev was an active and entrepreneurial person. He found us a basement that we rented to use as a workshop. We worked for a year like that, doing fine, but then people stopped calling. We only had one or two calls a month that brought us no money and no orders."

Then, however, Ponomaryov’s former classmates from the institute began their careers in architecture started receiving orders to design interiors. "They began offering me work making and installing furniture in the apartments they were working on," Ponomaryov remembers.

Ponomaryov still works today in co-operation with a number of architecture bureaus. "We don’t think up anything ourselves," he says. "The architects come up with the design and we then give it form. We choose the materials and assemble it in accordance with the designer or architect’s idea."

As his work progressed, Ponomaryov worked on perfecting his furniture-making skills, learning about new technologies and materials and acquiring new tools. He says that the business brings him a decent income "but won’t make me a millionaire."

"Half of the money from each order goes into the materials, 10 percent goes for tools and my partner, and I divide the remaining 40 percent," he explains. "Some would see what we earn as being a lot, but you have to take into account that we get this money only once every three to six months. We get the money and immediately pay off our debts, because, in between getting paid for orders, we live in debt."

Currently, Ponomaryov says, he is working on furniture for the apartment of a Japanese businessman in Moscow. "If all goes well, I want to use the money from this order to buy a plot of land outside Moscow in Svyatigorovo," he said. "The best thing about that place is that there is no road out there. An ordinary car won’t get through, but I have an old off-road vehicle that can make it out there."

That appears to fit Ponomaryov’s lifestyle. He works hard, but he’s not one to work around the clock to make as much money as possible. Usually, he begins work at 10 in the morning and ends at eight at night.

Ponomaryov and his partner work together, only rarely hiring additional workers for one-off jobs. "This system is good for the client," he said. "We do all the measuring and installation and hand everything over to the client, who always knows whom to talk to if something isn’t to his liking.

"The big firms work in a different way, with one person doing the measuring and another doing the installation, and, if something ends up crooked, you don’t know who to blame. We do everything ourselves. We don’t want to open a big company. I like to be involved in the whole process from beginning to end and do everything with my own hands."

Ponomaryov says that he has no fears that someone will place an order and then not pay. "We’ve never had such a case," he says. "People are generally honest."

But he says he’s aware that the danger is always there. "I know that, if something were to happen, the state would not protect me," he says. "Formalities are at a bare minimum with us. We cannot afford to pay high taxes; we have our families to feed."

But such things do not worry Ponomaryov. It is hard to frighten off someone who once journeyed from Moscow to Sakhalin without money.