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| Italian Tuscan Design, Home Interiors | Tuscan Architecture, Home Style |
Italian Home Decor, Design, Style |
Life’s simple pleasures resound soulfully in the tranquility and silence of a time-arrested haven, and morning song was never more beautiful than in a centuries-old cottage hugged by the Tuscan hillside. The tone is set for private reverie in a landscape of dusty cypress-lined roads, patched and decaying stone walls, and rusticated renaissance facades. Here, framed hillside views are eloquent masterpieces, configured by nature and edited by man. Magnificent views become quintessential elements of interior design.
The Italian home reflects an artistic and rightfully inherited passion for beauty, color, and tradition. Furniture is crafted of chestnut, oak, and walnut, and soft furnishings reveal their owner’s love for old, yet still vibrant laces and textiles. Nearly every room features the rare cloth treasures, from lush embroidered fabrics and petit-point tapestries-turned-pillows to lacy cotton weaves and textured linens. Cushions and drapery are tailored blends of subdued striping, muted solids, and symmetrical motifs, and the mix offers perfect complement deep polished woods, aged to beautifully uneven hues. In the bedroom, glowing with the suns rays, sheer curtains float on four sides of a Florentine four-poster. Hand-wrought and slender iron spokes are marked with the patina of age. Chips of old paint splash the antique metal with gorgeously random color.
Tuscan living is a sublime harmonization of the natural and the mad-made. Tinted lime-washed dividing walls rise to ceilings constituted by dark native timbers, while heavy exterior walls are left exposed on the interior side of the dwelling. Pale green-gray stone, mortared and stacked in large irregular and rectangular shapes, becomes pleasing backdrop to interior design. Throughout the home, painted iron-frame windows look out across terraced hills and orchards, whose bounty is prized not least at mealtimes. In the kitchen, alongside bronze cookery and large serving utensils, dried herbs, olives, freshly picked tomatoes, garlic cloves, and pepperoncinis hang from the rafters, tied in small bunches. Majolica pottery brightens shelves adjacent to a wood burning stove.
Behind the home, decades-old grapevines cling to splinter and crevice atop a wooden arbor and stone-tiled patio. Under the late afternoon sun, the slow moving lines of light and shade are personalities in their own right, and in fine company with the cool rustling breezes of autumn.
| Tuscan Rustic Style, Home Design | Florentine Decor, Interior Design | Italy Travel, Tours, Vacation |
From the grand palazzo and majestic villa to the small yet cozy apartment condominium overlooking alleyway or avenue, the use of stone brick as primary building material is much of what makes the Italian home so beautiful. In Italy, however, beauty is not a thing that happens perhaps by chance. As one of life’s great pleasures, beauty for the Italians is also a number one priority. The pursuit of pretty ideal reached its highest - and most appealing - expression during the Renaissance, a time of intense interest in harmony, balance, and symmetry.
Quintessentially Italian, the communes of Bologna, Florence, Sienna, and Venice took on much of their characteristic appearances during the middle ages. But while Bologna and Florence are Roman towns built on a grid, Sienna and Venice are almost entirely medieval in origin. Florence and Sienna also share a common artistic heritage in addition to common political experiences as merchant republics. Rivalries between them affected town aesthetics - both towns mandated the use of stone brick for in edicts specifically intended to bring about greatest communal beauty. In Sienna, such ordinates unified the appearance of an entire city.
Bologna is remarkable for its covered walkways, or porticoes, products of the oldest known urban statutes in Italy. The statutes were designed to increase living space for an expanding population, while at the same time allowing for ample public passage. Although private homes were individually constructed according the scale and design specifications of the owner, all were required to align the overhang with adjacent houses. An extraordinary show of individualism in collectivity, the porticoes of Bologna, centuries on, remain a poetic definition of urban beauty.
Italian Tuscan Home Decor, Interiors |
Mediterranean Home Improvement, Design |
Italy Travel |
