Welcome to COLOR YOUR LIFE – Guest Blogger week! We have invited 5 vibrant contributors to the Colorhouse blog to write about how color inspires the creative work they do and beautifies the world we live in. Today’s guest blogger: designer Angela Adams.

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For the past 20 years, partners in life and design, Angela Adams and furniture designer, Sherwood Hamill have cultivated a shared visual language that marries nostalgia and modernity in a way that is both grounded and quite unexpected. Since founding angela adams in Portland, Maine in 1998, they have been dedicated to celebrating a natural lifestyle by creating well-crafted modern home furnishings. They have launched several complementary collections of furniture, area rugs and tapestries that have established them as international leaders in contemporary design.

Sitting here at my desk, I am feeling a little stifled at the prospect of writing about color. I do not know where to begin - or if I will ever know where to end. Color is my first language and its what makes me feel at home.

Living on the Coast of Maine is a color-loving persons dream. The palette here changes every hour with the seasons, the weather, the tides… its ever changing and rain or shine - it’s always beautiful.

The things that most inspire me are: Dense foggy mornings with wet green grass… it’s almost as if the color keeps your eyelids hanging low and sleepy till the fog burns off.

A whirling big blizzard that blankets Portland in snow, casting blue shadows and soft pillowy acoustics softening everything.

Dead low tides in the fall, when the sea weed is draped over the ocean floor like gold, pearly pink winter sunsets that cast a soft glow on the waterfront. Its endless and feeds my inspiration every day.

When I design, I almost always start with the question “How do I want this to make me feel?” Very often, it seems that I am striving for a feeling, such as the one you might feel when you are looking out into dense fog first thing in the morning. That is a calm, comforting feeling. Fog makes you feel private and introverted. It’s not distracting, because its all one big beautiful thing visually (the other senses are also stirring… the smell is salty, wet and fresh… the sound is thick, muffled and soft). So if I am designing a rug that I want to feel like fog, all those things shape the process and the outcome.

On the other hand, when I want to try to capture the feeling of looking at an amazing sunset, it’s a completely different feeling. The colors are much louder, in the way you almost hear a boom when you see an intense sunset. The delineation among the colors can be very defined. Sunsets are bold and confident, so the colors need to blast off in a way that feels good and powerful, without making you feel like squinting. You want to soak it all in and not miss a thing.

My favorite colors are always changing, but a few tend to always bubble at the top. Dandelion yellow makes me happy and reminds me of my Grandmother. Aqua blues feels like home to me, because I grew up on an island and live on the coast. Grassy greens and soft greys bring the outside in and create mossy woodland areas in our home. My Grandmothers rule was that if two colors grow together in nature - then they go together in fashion or the home. So I still go with that - since that counts every color in!

- Angela Adams

For more inspiring images from Angela Adams, visit our Color Your Life Pinterest board!