Cream is Old, White is New, and Other Thoughts About Italy

I’m finally back from my amazing vacation. Italy was a whirlwind, and I’ll have lots to share with you. We had some wonderful tour guides in Rome, Florence, Verona, and Venice. It was fascinating and very educational.

I hope you enjoyed the guest posts by my True Colour Experts™ these past three weeks! I was online just enough to make sure my emails didn’t get out of control, and I loved the comments and how much you all gave them your love and support! I missed my community of readers, and I’m so happy to be back!

One thing I noticed about the exteriors in Italy was the use of mostly cream over white. Even when a paint colour was quite light, the trim colour was often still cream. It made me realize the reason white seems so fresh and new, is that it IS! ; )

Whites will yellow over time (depending on what it is). This is why it’s important to understand the continuum of whites that I talk about in my ebook, White is Complicated: A Decorator’s Guide to Choosing the Right White. In that book, I show you when white looks bad and when cream looks bad.

Getting white right is much more about understanding the continuum of whites than it is about undertones.

Okay, back to Italy. As some of you already know, you can’t paint your house or building any colour you want in most communities; the municipality provides a list you have to choose from, and it appears to be mostly in the pink, orange, yellow, and green family.

In fact, in Cortona, our guide told us that you get a list of approximately 7 or 8 shades of yellow, and that’s it.

Light or dark versions of oranges, yellows, and pinks look the best with a Mediterranean-style roof (like I talked about here), so what you end up with is a lovely, colourful, and harmonious result. It’s also the reason why almost everywhere you look, you want to snap a photo. It’s hard to say that about the average city in North America.

Shutters in Italy are functional, and they open and close. Which is why they look so fabulous on the buildings.

You can sometimes get away with adding smaller shutters to an exterior with larger windows, but it is definitely on a case-by-case basis.

The faded blue you see on the shutters in the photo above was the same everywhere. I saw very few exteriors painted in blue, and they were not in the city.

I noticed that even when clean and dirty colours were right beside each other, they didn’t look bad because everything was still varying shades of the same colours.

Here’s where breaking the clean and dirty rule mostly worked!

The green beige shades on this exterior (above) seemed to also be the go-to neutral shade for trim in Italy, as shown in the first image on this post.

Seeing pink beige anywhere was really rare. Mostly, shades of pink were mixed with peach, coral, orange, and yellow.

When we found ourselves on this rooftop restaurant in Rome for dinner one evening (above), I decided that next time, I’m booking a room at a hotel like this because it was mostly hotels that had restaurants located on the roof.

The picture above was taken in Florence. Along with the green beige that’s everywhere, you’ll also find mostly forest green shutters.

In Italy, forest green is not dated and 80s!

My yellow was everywhere, and I loved it!

Rome was really hot!! I brought this easily packable black jersey dress that I wore many times on this trip.

Terreeia & Maria

Okay, so here’s the undertone lesson of the day…

I took this picture in the Vatican museum. Notice all the different undertones of neutrals here (above and below).

Do you know what they are? My True Colour Experts do, and so should you if you are a design professional.

Discovering undertones through my Specify Colour with Confidence™ training should be the very first step in any design/colour career.

 

During Day 3, when we talk about the Business of Colour, I’ll reveal my business model and you’ll discover how to conduct colour consultations online. Something you cannot do without my training.

And for those of you asking when I’ll next be in your city? Well, hopefully I’ll eventually get there, but if all it takes is a short flight (much easier than coming to Canada), then you should get here ASAP.

How long can you pretend that you understand colour as well as you know you should?

Before you found my website, you could live inside the illusion that most designers do until they discover that they don’t know what they don’t know (undertones) from my 3-day, groundbreaking, revolutionary training.

And that illusion is this:

“Colour is hard. It’s either hit or miss, and all you can do is test it. Sometimes you get it right, and sometimes you don’t.” This is an actual quote from the stage by a celebrity designer!

Colour is NOT hard. It’s just a system that you can ONLY get here, with me, live. So register here, I can’t wait to meet you!!

xoxo, Maria

P.S. I’m off to have a Spritz, my new favourite cocktail from Italy (below).

Terreeia’s and my spritzes in Rome!

Ingredients:

3 parts Prosecco

2 parts Aperol

2 splashes of soda, poured over ice and garnished with a slice of orange

Saluti! (Cheers!)

Related posts:

Why Pink Beige Should be Banished Forever

The 4 Categories of White Everyone should Know

A Dirty Answer to a Clean Question