Why do we love the look of Italian Style Homes -with those gray or ivory white, yellowish, pink or pale green walls, so simple and elegant?

Classic Italian Style is a style that will stand the test of time. The style is unlike the rustic styles of Tuscan Style Homes.

Floors are usually tile or wood plank – just as in the rustic Tuscan style… but the tile or wood will have a finer finish.

Ornately designed rugs and marble tile floors are, in fact, part of normal – every day – Italian Style Home decorating.  Installed carpet is not something you will find in Italian design.

True Italian style also does not have heavy window treatments.

The classic Italian style home will have light flowing curtains and shutters to block out the harsh afternoon sun… still allowing the opportunity to capture even the slighted of breeze.

Ceiling medallions are just one common architectural treatment that the Italians are famous for… you will find plaster relief on walls, ceilings and fireplace fronts.

The one aspect above all others that must be remembered when designing a true classic Italian style home interior:

Nothing should ever look brand new! A sense of age and heritage is important when styling as the Italians do.

History of the Italianate Style

The Italianate style, most prevalent in America between the 1850s and the 1880s, was inspired by rambling, informal Italian farmhouses and Italian-style villa architecture.

The Italian style placed an emphasis on the vertical orientation of the building, as if someone was pulling the top of the building up, and as if the building was made of putty, as it stretched upwards, the windows and door frames became narrower and attenuated.

The dominant characteristic of the Italianate style was the low, overhanging roof with decorative eave brackets; there was often much decorative detail applied to the building just at the roof line.

The windows were accentuated with thick, decorative hoods and the front entrances were often highlighted with a tower, a cupola or a projecting porch.

Italianate buildings were more playful and decorative than the earlier Greek Revival buildings and their floor plans designs were often asymmetrical.

This style’s popularity spread quickly across the country, partially as a result of newly-available building pattern books.

These books, once considered too costly to reproduce, were now less expensive so families and builders alike could use them as reference manuals in designing their own buildings.

It really is apparent with the quality in the colors on stucco or concrete, a finish which cannot be obtained by unpainted or by stained or painted wood.

Italian homes hold a  special claim of the shadows from deep eaves when they fall on broad, united, grainy surfaces – there are impressions of durability.

Italian Style Decorating looks of security from fire, of impenetrability by damp and other suggestions of a practical kind which may not be altogether true in the wall that has a plaster skin, but at any rate seems true.

I venture to say that brick seems less durable, less serviceable in keeping out the cold of winter and the heat of summer.

As a matter of fact, a well-built, solid concrete wall, and even a thoroughly finished stucco wall, should be less permeable to wind and moisture than one of uncovered brick.

So that there is good practical reason for covering brick with stucco as a reinforcement and ceiling against the drive of the rain storm, however that fashion may be decried as lacking full sincerity in the aesthetic sense.

The architecture of Italy still uses brick walls clad in stucco, and molded to simulate great courses of stone—a sham, of course.

But then, what is this architecture of frame house, metal lath and plaster skin but a sham also?

It simulates your stone house, or your brick laced with stucco, or your solid wall of concrete of the Tuscan Style Decorating in homes.

Isn’t it better to build so that houses will remain practically unchangeable, only gathering grace with age, gaining a fine patina, but subject to ruin neither by fire nor decay ?