The Crafting Cellar on the Village Greene side of Historic Smithville remains open and will continue to be open through at least March following the death last month of its longtime owner.

Bob DeFillipo died following an accident on the White Horse Pike on Nov. 19. DeFillipo owned the Smithville shop for 14 years, and since then, his daughter, Nicole Hyde, has been running the store.

“The crafters are still bringing me merchandise, and I’m running the business like normal,” Hyde said on Thursday afternoon, Dec. 20. “New pieces are still coming in and we’re keeping our normal hours.

“We’ll be here for the next 2-3 months, and then we’ll see what happens in the spring.”

 At 37, Hyde is the baby of the family. She has a sister and a brother, and she worked with her father at the store when it first opened, and was there for seven years.

“I stopped when my son was born, but I would help out occasionally,” Hyde said.

Over the last seven years, she worked for the magazine, book and newspaper store Hudson News, where she was a supervisor for two years. She took a demotion at that job so she could continue her father’s business.

“I’m doing it because of my father’s love of the store,” Hyde said. “I felt like I owed it to him to keep it running. … It’s all the same stuff and I’m going to bring in the same merchandise. This will still be Bob’s store, and it will always be Bob’s store.”

She said everything will still be hand made, although she can’t put the same amount of time into the store her father did. DeFillipo woke up before the crack of dawn most days, but his daughter is held back by the constraints of having a child, but there is no lack of quality in the work.

“I started by touching up a lot of the things that were already done, and then I started painting the other things from scratch,” Hyde said. “I’m doing what he did on a smaller scale.”

DeFillipo was a cornerstone of the Village Greene portion of Historic Smithville. His crafts litter the village as holiday decorations.  He previously worked as a car salesman, but left the business and moved to Smithville following two heart attacks. The store was originally something he was going to do on a temporary basis.

The Crafting Cellar still has a “big following,” Hyde said, and all the crafters her father worked with have remained loyal to her.

“All the crafters are behind me,” Hyde said. “They want the store to stay and they want to see me succeed.”