In an age when we are urged to minimalize, to pare down the design of our rooms and the contents of our closets, walking into Folk in Kittery Foreside brings to mind the famous William Morris quote: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” On a marble-topped table in the center of the shop lie a camel-colored leather wallet, a neatly folded creamy white alpaca cardigan, and a precisely arranged display of pocket knives and corkscrews, their handles inlaid with kaleidoscope-like designs in colored wood. On a nearby shelf, beeswax candles, wooden spoons, and marbled stoneware vases share space with apothecary bottles and boxes of Douglas fir spring tip tea. Along one wall, flat glass cases hold contemporary jewelry and a clothing rack includes a pair of velvety, burnt sienna corduroy pants I can’t resist reaching out to touch. In fact, nearly everything at Folk invites tactile interaction. While the shop itself is small and there is a spare quality to the arrangement of merchandise, there is also an astonishing range of texture: linen, wood, metal, leather, paper, wool, and stone. “People will come in and spend two hours picking up everything in the store, which is just fine,” says owner Amelia Davis. “We may have special things, or may treat them sort of preciously, but I don’t want them to be inaccessible.”

When Davis opened Folk the week before Thanksgiving in 2013, hers was the second business to move into the block-long, former Masonic Hall that is now the anchor of Wallingford Square. “Lil’s Cafe was the only other thing in the building and the employees would always come in for a break and chat with me,” Davis says. There’s a clear sense of style at Folk, but also an atmosphere of approachable serenity, buoyed by Davis’s purposeful merchandising and also by the wide range of prices. “I maybe have a little more of an urban aesthetic, which I try to blend with what fits here,” she says. “For me, the display is just as important as the object that’s going on it, and I think it might help the customer determine how an item could look in their home.”

Having grown up in Portsmouth and Kittery, Davis has a good idea what fits in her hometown, and how to appeal to both locals and visitors who stream into Kittery from Boston and beyond year round. The daughter of a former plant nursery owner and an architect, she studied printmaking and painting on the West Coast—at California College of the Arts in Oakland, and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington—followed by a stint in New York City, before moving back to Maine. She went to work for her mother, Ellen Mitchell, at the Pick of the Planet, Mitchell’s former wholesale and retail business specializing in tender perennials and unusual tropical plants. It was just her second experience in retail. “People used to tell me, even when I was young, that I should open a shop, but I never really thought about it until I saw the space in Wallingford Square,” Davis says. “I always had creative friends—artists and makers—and I knew I wanted to work for myself and to support people doing honest work with their hands.”