Mirrors. They can create airiness and illusions of space in a room. They can enhance lighting and add a touch of elegance to a home.

Straightforward to build, and not so big they can’t be shipped directly from their shop, framed mirrors seemed promising to Hugh and Avis Williams seven years ago when they were looking for a wood product they could build and sell together.

The Williamses’ hunch proved to be a good one. A little over a year after moving to Maine in 1990, they began producing small wood-framed mirrors in a workshop adjoining their Cape home in the Hancock County town of Franklin. They have gone from selling several hundred a year to fine gift shops largely in Maine to supplying a couple thousand annually to retail stores as far afield as Washington state — even Japan. Their pieces also have been carried in well-known catalogs such as Yield House, Eddie Bauer, Sugar Hill and Ballard Designs.

Initially, the Williamses built all of the mirrors themselves. Now, they employ three people.

“When we moved to Maine, we really wanted to create a lifestyle that we had control over, and we really like to work with our hands to create things,” said Avis. “Hugh and I have no children together, so this product is our baby. The business and our employees have become, in a sense, a family.”

Classic designs and consistent quality come to mind when describing the Williamses’ line of wood-framed, beveled mirrors. Turned rosette blocks — the kind found on door frames and window casings in 19th century New England houses — grace some of the mirrors. Others feature ornaments pressed from old Victorian dies and crown and dentil molding.

The Williamses’ frames are made largely from Eastern white pine, but some come in oak and cherry with an oil finish. Others boast a stained or painted finish ranging in hues from mustard to burgundy. These days, the most popular style has been a crackled, lightly distressed finish.

Shaded by a row of old, handsome maples, the Williamses’ granite-gray clapboard home with cream-colored trim and their adjacent workshop sit on a rural road winding along the eastern shore of Hog Bay in Franklin. Blue, green, brown and white antique bottles line the windowsills. A crab trap with small oyster shells caught in the wire mesh hangs as a sculpture on the wall.

Over coffee and freshly baked blueberry buckle, the Williamses relate that they previously lived in Wilmington, N.C. — that state’s largest seaport — at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. She ran her own dress shop. He worked as a free-lance finish carpenter in the boat-building industry. Working with fine wood such as teak and mahogany, he finished the often-extravagant interiors of cruising sailboats measuring as long as 55 feet.

The two married in 1989. For years, Hugh had enjoyed an ideal living situation. He rented a charming saltwater farmhouse framed by live oak trees dripping with moss for the amazing price of $65 per month. He recalls his landlady lamenting when she had to boost his rent to $50 from $45.

“I hate to see things go up,” he recalls her saying.

But the landlady died, leaving the property to her Lutheran church, and he was forced to move out.

By that time, Hugh and Avis had decided they were ready for a change of scenery. She had lived in Yarmouth and Kennebunk before and had always had it in mind to move back to Maine. Combing the weekly newspapers, they found a rental ad for a farmhouse and barn in Milbridge. They put down a two-month deposit on the property, sight unseen, and headed north.

Both driving vehicles hauling trailers behind, the Williamses and their two cats arrived in Milbridge to find their prospective Maine home unlivable. Leaving one of their vehicles and the two trailers in the driveway, they rented a motel room for the night and set out in search of an empty house to rent.

“We turned left from Route 200 onto the Hog Bay Road and drove a ways,” remembers Hugh. “I said, `Avis that house doesn’t look lived in.”‘

The clapboard Cape happened to be for rent. They moved in that night and have been there ever since. They ended up buying the place less than a year later.

During the couple’s first year in Maine, Avis landed work hanging floral wallpaper in a shingle-style summer cottage on Grindstone Neck in Winter Harbor. That job led to Hugh’s being hired to remodel the kitchen and upstairs bathroom in the same house.

The Williamses say it was Hugh’s construction of some wooden frames for Franklin painter and sculptor Phil Barter that inspired the idea of coming up with a small wooden product they could make together.

At first, Avis peddled the wood-framed mirrors out of the back of her Isuzu Trooper, selling to gift, bath, lighting, framing and furniture shops along the Maine coast. Sheepscot Pottery in Edgecomb was one of the couple’s early accounts.

“Luckily, mirrors fit into a variety of stores,” Avis says. “They are good complements.”

The Williamses credit the state-run Small Business Development Center’s Maine Products Marketing Program with helping them devise a marketing strategy. They began traveling to trade shows in New York, Philadelphia and High Point, N.C.

“We were a little fish in a big ocean,” she says. Adding to their delight, they found few if any exhibitors selling mirrors. “There was almost nobody.”

The trade shows were an education to the couple, who learned how to price and position their product for the wholesale market. They also acquired a sales representative.

The latest wave in furniture has been the worn look, so the Williamses learned the five-step crackled finish technique. First, a base coat of paint is applied to the frame. Next, a layer of glue is put on, followed by a topcoat and a clear coat of lacquer.

“You can watch it crackle before your eyes,” says Avis, adding that the frames are lightly sanded in key spots to enhance the worn look.

The Williamses’ latest coup has been to land a request from the Atlanta-based Ballard Designs retail catalog, which features fine home and garden furnishings, for an inventory of 450 mirrors. Scrambling to fill the order, they also are preparing to show their product line at trade shows in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

In the midst of all this, the couple has bought and is renovating a more-than-a-century-old clapboard store — known for years as Jerry’s Hardware — and adjacent buildings where they hope to relocate their shop.

The Williamses attribute their success to plain hard work.

“We put in an enormous amount of effort into making the business fly,” says Hugh. “We are really on top of the quality control. You don’t want to have to replace a mirror. That is as expensive as making it all over again.”

Hugh also sees their ability to work together as key.

“I usually defer to Avis as long as I agree with her,” he says, chuckling.