The Mediterranean style of decor comes from Spain, Greece and Italy, although the Spanish decor is the most popular. Indeed, the Mediterranean style is also called "Spanish modern."



Let's talk about Mediterranean style furniture.

Whether you need formal and elaborate furniture to simple pieces, the Mediterranean style has something for you. What makes this furniture distinctive is that the pieces have legs and fee - whether it is an armoir, a hutch, a cabinet table or a night stand. The furniture is made of dark woods - and may be ornately carved or left in simple, natural lines.

Fabric colors are plentiful, consisting of yellows, lavenders, blues and terracotta, meant to evoke the warmth of the land and the fireside, and the blues of the sky and the sea.

The Mediterranean style does not indulge in a lot of furniture per room - simplicity is the key. A table, a couple of chairs, and some area rugs of bright colors in a room strike the perfect note. This is regardless of whether or not the room is a bedroom or the living room.

What complements the sparseness of the furniture is the elaborate accessories - wrought iron lamps and candle sconces, chandeliers, burnished metallic light fixtures, decorative screens, and so on.

Morocco, a country in North Africa, has had a tremendous influence, decor wise, on the Mediterranean style of Spain (Spain was for a while appointed military protectorate of the country), and adds an exciting ethnic flavor to elaborately carved furniture and bright colors in fabrics.

When shopping for your furniture and accessories, you can decide on two ways to go - purchasing authentic pieces that are hundreds of years old - and expensive - or purchasing reproductions that look just as nice but may better fit your budget.

It's important when decorating your room or home in the Mediterranean style to have a well thought out plan. Depending on your budget you might not be able to complete your design all at once, you'll buy a piece here and a piece there as you find the appropriate items, so you must always keep in your mind what you want the final product to look like.

In order to decide what elements you want for your Mediterranean decor, check out the many sources on the subject, from books and magazines on interior decorating, to consultation with knowledgeable individuals at your local home decor stores, to surfing the web to see the galaxy of selections available to the home owner.