Portland, Maine, designer Angela Adams is known for beautiful midcentury-style wool rugs and custom-tufted carpets with naturalistic floral, animal and landscape motifs. Her expensive New Zealand wool rugs are easy to clean but are unsuitable for the outdoors.
"Coir has a vintage quality," Adams says, recalling the ubiquitous large mats outside dime stores of yesteryear. Those thick, earthy mats of woven coir handled a lot of foot traffic and were tough enough for sun, rain, snow and mud.
While Adams admires coir's virtues, she also likes to mitigate its organic rawness with stylized beach rock and flower patterns called Munjoy and Lulu.
"It is nice to liven a natural material like this with a modern graphic stenciled-on with a water-based nonacrylic ink," Adams says. "Of course, because it is natural, the dye on my mats will fade over time, but not quickly."
"This ensures that fibers won't fall off as easily as they did in old-fashioned mats," Adams says, pointing to another practical advantage of the thinner, stronger design. "When you try to open doors, they won't get stuck on the mat."
At a glance
Expert opinion: Natural coconut husk coir fits garden settings better than plastic mats, Angela Adams says. "We are trying to find a non-PVC backing to make it fully compostable."
Pros: Because coir is a natural material, it has variations in color and texture that make each doormat seem unique. Coir is long lasting and with the backing, the factory-made mats shed fewer fibers. To clean them, all it takes is a good shaking.
Cons: The mats soak up a lot of water when they get wet and might take a day or two to dry out.
