Nomadic Trading Co., the longtime local purveyor of authentic Turkish and Persian rugs in addition to unique home decor items, has found a new home downtown.

Owner Demir Williford closed his Carrboro location in 2007 after nine years in business and has been operating online since then.

All the while, he's been searching for a new space that fit his character. He had opportunities to rent space at more visible locales, he says, but he chose the location at 1000 W. Main St. (near the Federal) because it had the character he was looking for.

"To me, the space was everything," Williford said today over coffee at Parker & Otis. "It’s got to look good inside, it’s got to have a feeling, it’s got to be who I am."

Williford said he's particularly happy to be a part of the downtown renaissance. He likened it to when he opened his first location in Carrboro. Retail options were sparse there when he moved in, but he saw potential that since has borne fruit.

"I like to be some place where I feel like there’s going to be something exciting happening," he says.

"I see that there are a lot of people here who want to make things better. And there’s lots of room for growth."

He says the new store will be similar in many ways to the Carrboro location, now doubt good news to his many loyal customers. (He has a mailing list of 1,600.)

But it won't be exactly the same.

"Over these past two years, I’ve been doing outdoor antique shows," Demir says. "I've found a lot of industrial stuff that I’m kind of really liking now, Mexican folk art. So I'll be adding a few things on what I used to sell. But my mainstay is my tribal and nomadic folk art rugs, the non-commercial, the old, traditional, Turkish, Persian tribal rugs and textiles."

Demir has a romantic notion of his trade, traveling frequently to Turkey to persue offerings from some of the thousands of dealers there. He sees a story in each of these rugs, some woven decades earlier.

"A woman when she weaved a rug, very often she was weaving it for her dowry," Demir says.

"While she’s weaving, she has all these aspirations – for a husband and children and a life. She puts this into this weave."

He wants his customers to feel a sense of responsibility to their rugs the way he does, so he takes pains to tell the story of the pieces he sells.

"We’re like postmen," he says. "We take that letter and bring it to somebody else. Wherever the final desitnation is, you need to make sure the letter, the message, goes with it."

Demir will move into his newly renovated 1,600-square-foot space – leased to him by Reynolds Maxwell of Maverick Properties – on Nov. 15. He should be open just after Thanksgiving. Contact him at 413-5966.