The Mediterranean style evokes the feeling of tradition, old world simplicity, and artistic craftsmanship that people found comforting in a swiftly changing world. This style can be expressed using paint, furniture, colors, and accessories. Consult with an interior designer, home furnishing stores, local painter, and your local craftsman for your project. Here’s how to create the exotic air of the Mediterranean regions.
• Color: Since this style originated in countries north of the Mediterranean Sea: Spain, Italy, Morocco, and Greece; the colors often echo those of the earth, the sea and the sky. Prominent colors are vibrant, rustic colors of cool white, warm terra cotta, strong deep blues, reds, oranges, pinks, lavenders, clear yellow, brownish yellow, olive green of trees, and browns.
• Walls: Walls are predominantly textured, real or imagine. Choose textured paint or sand-textured wall to add visual depth. Hand rub layers of paint or glaze on plaster walls for muted effect. Simulate a look of plastered wall with a textured finish using tinted drywall compound and colored beeswax.
• Floors: Mediterranean style means hard floor surfaces; ceramic tiles, terra cotta tiles, mosaic tiles, limestone, travertine, or dark-tone hardwood flooring.
• Furniture: Select dark woods in distressed or worn finishes with ornately turned legs and feet, low to the floor. Tables are typically rustic, aged, solid and rectangular wood with legs on the outer corners with matching chairs. Hardware is heavy and burnished.
• Accessories: Use wrought iron fireplace screen, rustic iron filigree light fixtures, burnished bronze urns, scrolled wrought iron candle holders, hand-crafted iron-work mirror frames, and oversize potteries to add Mediterranean flavor to your home. Copper, stoneware, large vases, forged iron mixes with wood, religious paintings and statuary with touches of gold also suggest Mediterranean feel. Stone fireplace mantels and countertops often have bull-nose edge.
• Rugs and tapestries: Choose rustic, ethnic, simple and uncluttered style rugs and tapestries in vibrant colors to create a warm and cozy feel to your decorating scheme.
• Windows: Windows are often left bare. Place scrolled iron grilles to create the Mediterranean look used in architecture across Europe. Horizontal wood blinds, brightly painted wooden shutters, and lace curtains can work.
Mediterranean style has evolved for centuries and emerged in simple, functional, and unmistakable designs that can add the exotic flair to your home. Establish a repeat pattern of wrought iron furnishings, earthy colors, and old-world influences throughout your home for a fresh and vibrant feeling of European villas. Give yourself a reward after you achieved the right ambiance by inviting family and friends for a fiesta.
