Visit Angela Adams in Portland, Maine

Four rug designs—Daytrip, Eden, Betty, and Garden—hang on the wall in the front window of Angela Adams’s eponymous Portland, Maine, showroom. A walnut table accommodates accessories.

The showroom, with its polished-concrete floors, opened in May on Free Street.

The Woodland coasters provide little bits of color to put under your coffee or cocktail.

The Woodland rug anchors Hamill’s Propeller table, while the Glacier and Pine Tree rugs hang on the wall near Hamill’s Origami end tables.

Customers can browse rug patterns, run their hands over 100 percent New Zealand wool color samples, and customize their purchases at the shop’s “design center.”

The showroom offers canvas totes hand-painted by Adams.

Dopp kits are crafted by leather-goods maker 33 By Hand and printed with Adams’s designs.

Shop owners and designers Sherwood Hamill and Angela Adams.

When Angela Adams and Sherwood Hamill began their rug and furniture company in 1998, they had no background in rugmaking. Native Mainers (Adams from North Haven, Hamill from Falmouth), they lived in Portland and worked with rugmakers fromLewiston, who balked at some of the innovations the couple wanted to try.

“Sometimes what you don’t know has its benefits,” says Adams. “By not having training, we just dove in and designed rugs in this three-dimensional way.” When the couple asked that the rugmakers tuft in the opposite direction or combine more than just two colors of yarn, they often heard, “You can’t do that.”

Experimentation, however, paid off. Angela Adams rugs, distinguished by combined techniques and designs featuring various pile thicknesses, spawned an oft-copied trend. It has been so successful that Adams and Hamill decided to close the furniture-making part of their business and devote time entirely to rugs that, she says, “translate the landscape and vibe of Maine into pattern and design.”

In December, they opened a retail showroom on Portland’s Free Street. Barely three blocks long, the street isn’t highly visible, despite being in the heart of the city’s touristy Old Port. Thisis as it’s always been, says Adams, who points out that former Portland showrooms were all a little off the beaten path.

The showroom officially opened in May with the first of many planned “confabs,” open-to-the-public conversations with writers, artists, and other Maine creatives. The space features furniture by Hamill, who collaborated with designer/brand expert Robert Verrier on the floor plan and flow. The main counter and “design center” are made from laminated beams reclaimed from a factory out West. A walnut shelving unit displays accessories—coasters, canvas totes with Adams’s hand-painted designs, and leather Dopp kits, a collaboration between Adams and Portland-based 33 By Hand. Adams also designed the custom wall graphics.

Rugs, of course, grace walls and lay on polished-concrete floors. “We want our space to be an experience for people to come in, find out what we do, feel comfortable and inspired,” Adams concludes.

Angela Adams, Portland, Maine, angelaadams.com