WASHINGTON — Textile, carpet and furniture designer Annie Selke started her business in 1994 sewing a seat cushion at her dining room table.

Early on, she sometimes needed the help of her entire family to fill a big order. Her husband packed boxes. Her parents and in-laws typed labels and invoices. Her 21/2-year-old daughter was taught how and where to place price stickers.

Since then, Selke has been quietly building her companies in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. She has gradually gained publicity in shelter magazine spreads and has been selling her designs in boutiques and department stores and through mail-order catalogues and other retailers' Web sites nationwide.

Now her business is about to hit it huge.

Selke has begun selling her affordable Dash & Albert rugs online, at www.dashandalbert.com. This follows the launch of a furniture collection and a licensing deal with national chain Calico Corners, which began selling her fabrics, trim and furniture in the fall. Combined, these business moves put her on a path to becoming a household name.

"Everything she's been working for over the last 15 years has reached a peak," says Jan Jessup, a spokeswoman for Calico Corners. "She's really breaking through as a major design influence."

Selke's style is cheerful, pretty and practical. The basis for her designs is classic forms, such as stripes and florals, but she tweaks them with color to make them more modern. It's traditional but much more fun.

"The first word that comes to mind is 'happy,' " Stephen Drucker, editor of House Beautiful magazine, says of Selke's look. "The second word is 'comfortable.' The third, 'casual.' She's like the American decorating equivalent to good jeans and a good T-shirt to me. ... It's hard to imagine having a bad day in an Annie Selke room."

Selke says she finds inspiration for her designs everywhere. The Uma Resist bedding pattern from her Pine Cone Hill company was inspired by an antique Chinese fabric, the motif on the Madeline quilt from a 1940s silk dressing gown. The idea for the Dash & Albert Scroll rug came from a gate in Charleston, S.C. Inside the company warehouse are approximately 5,000 pieces of vintage and antique linens, dresses, tickings, quilts, blankets, lace, silks and paisleys that Selke has picked up from antiques markets all around the world.

"I like things that are timeless and authentic but still fresh," she says.

Part of Selke's appeal is that her products are designed not only to be enjoyed, but also to stand up to reality-based living. Life is messy, especially with children and pets, and Selke designs from experience. She has a teenage daughter and three dogs. "Everything is washable," she says.

"Some people create rooms that reflect who they want to be," Drucker says. "Annie creates rooms that reflect who she is. It's not surprising that that is successful, because she's really likable, and people connect with that."

Selke, 46, grew up in Stockbridge, Mass., tagging along with her schoolteacher mother to antiques shops and auctions. She attended the prestigious Miss Porter's School in Connecticut (which Selke says she chose because the architecture instantly appealed to her and the dorm rooms were decorated with Colefax and Fowler wallpaper). After high school, she studied textile science at the University of Vermont, soaking up everything she could about art history and the histories of costume, interior design, fabric and wallpaper.

"To me, history isn't about wars; it's about fabrics," she jokes.

Shortly after Selke started her business with husband Whitney, they had three employees, 250 square feet of office space and 28 products. Today, they have 132 employees, a 200,000-square-foot office and warehouse space, and 10,000 items in production.

Her trio of home decor companies are Pine Cone Hill (quilts, throws, bedding, sheets, pajamas and curtains); Dash & Albert Rug Co. (rugs and accessories) and Potluck Studios (tabletop). Together with the recently launched Annie Selke Home, Selke says, they rake in about approximately $50 million annually in retail sales.

Annie Selke Home is an umbrella company for products that she designs but doesn't manufacture, including an 80-piece furniture collection with Vanguard Furniture, a fabric line through P. Kaufman and a line of coordinating trims with Gelberg Braid.

The Home collection is available through area Vanguard retailers and at Calico Corners. Calico is also the exclusive retailer for the fabric and trim.

Selke also has two retail shops in Lenox, Mass. Pine Cone Hill: The Home Store, which started as a laboratory for Selke to see what customers liked and disliked, carries merchandise from all of her lines. The Pine Cone Hill Outlet Store, which is upstairs in the same building, carries overstock, discounted and discontinued items.

Dash & Albert, named after two of Selke's dogs, carries 170 rug designs. Its popular cotton woven rugs range from $28 (for a 2-by-3) to $385 (for a 9-by-12). High demand and a lack of shops that carried every design prompted Selke to launch her first e-commerce site. At this time, there are no plans for her other companies to go online.

Selke recently moved her companies' headquarters to a fabulously renovated 200,000-square-foot old mill in Pittsfield, Mass. From this light-filled space, the business is able to do everything in-house, from designing catalogues and Web sites to wash-testing every product and filling catalogue orders. The building has its own fitness center and photo studio, a physical archive of every Pine Cone Hill and Dash & Albert product ever created and a FedEx truck on the loading dock waiting for its daily shipment.

A home base in the Berkshires may seem unlikely for someone who spends so much time traversing exotic locales. But Selke's love for New England life is steadfast. "My husband and I grew up here," she says. "The quality of life here is wonderful. There's no traffic. I like space, and I love the country."

On a recent day in Selke's new office space, she was energetic and animated, munching on a clementine as she walked and talked. She was dressed in dark-washed denim, boots and a long, brown sweater cinched at the waist with a wide leather belt. On one hand, she wore a large acrylic ring shaped like a snow globe and filled with glitter that danced happily with every gesture.

"I like things that are decorative and things that have a sense of humor, a little panache," she says.

She also likes to think about the future: "Paint, wallpaper and carpet licenses make sense. Lighting and decorative accessories would be great, too." She's also in the midst of writing a book proposal.

"It's not that I want to take over the world," she says. "I just want to make it more beautiful."