Coastal Is Not
the Same as Mediterranean

The short version. A coastal table takes its cues from the sea, wherever that sea happens to be. A Mediterranean table comes from a specific stretch of coast and carries the food, the craft and the materials of that place along with the water. Most of the good tables you have seen are both at once, which is why the two words got tangled in the first place.

We cut, sew and embroider placemats, napkins and bread baskets in Italy, in both vocabularies, which is the only reason we have had to think this hard about the difference.

What a Coastal Table Takes From the Sea

Coastal is a relationship, not an address. It works in the Hamptons, in Nantucket, in Palm Beach, on the coast of California and on the Mediterranean, because what it borrows is the same everywhere: light, air, water and the colors they leave behind.

The way it gets expressed changes a great deal from Nantucket to Palm Beach to California. In the American register it usually means sand tones, white, the paler blues, natural fibers and a lighter hand, with references drawn from what washes up. Shells, coral, fish. The table often stays spare, because the view is doing a great deal of the work.

A coastal table is usually lighter than the room it sits in. That is the point of it.

What a Mediterranean Table Takes From a Place

The Mediterranean has the same sea and a different inheritance.

A table in Liguria, Provence, Andalusia or the Cyclades was shaped by what grew inland as much as by what swam offshore: olives, citrus, tomatoes, herbs, bread, wine. The Mediterranean adds a layer rather than swapping one out: ceramic, glass, wood, metalwork, linen, and the colors of the land behind the coast.

So the palette widens. Alongside the cobalt and the white there is terracotta, ochre, olive green, oatmeal, the color of unbleached cloth and of stone. There also tends to be more evidence of the meal itself on the table: bread, oil, a serving dish, the ceramic it came in. Eating together is part of the vocabulary and not only the presentation of it.

At its best a Mediterranean table feels lived in rather than staged. It belongs to a house where people eat every day, not to a photograph of a view.

This is not only our reading of it. When UNESCO inscribed the Mediterranean diet on its list of intangible cultural heritage, the description reached well beyond food: skills, knowledge, rituals and symbols around crops, fishing and cooking, and above all the sharing of meals. It names the craftsmanship of the vessels food is carried and eaten from, ceramic plates and glasses among them, and it lists seven countries rather than one. The table is inside the definition.

Where the Two Meet

Almost everywhere people actually want to be.

Amalfi is coastal and Mediterranean at the same time. So are Capri, the Sardinian coast, Sicily, the Ligurian villages and half the islands of Greece. A lunch on the Amalfi Coast has the light and the water of a coastal table and the lemons, the ceramic and the long afternoon of a Mediterranean one.

This is why the two words collapsed into each other. The most photographed Mediterranean places are also coastal, so the coastal vocabulary got treated as the whole of it.

The useful test is what happens when you move inland. In Tuscany, in Provence, in the hills behind the southern Italian coast, the sea disappears from the table while the rest of the vocabulary stays: olive oil, linen, terracotta, herbs, stone. Nothing there refers to the water, and nobody would mistake it for the Hamptons.

Mediterranean Does Not Mean Blue and White

This is the part most comparisons get wrong, and it matters when you are buying.

Blue and white is one Mediterranean register, and a beautiful one. It is not the definition. An Italian table can be almost entirely neutral and still be unmistakably Mediterranean: oatmeal linen, unglazed ceramic, olive wood, one lemon on a plate. The Mediterranean is as much ochre and terracotta and stone as it is cobalt.

Which is why a Mediterranean table works through the year while a strictly nautical one does not. Take the blue out of a nautical table and most of the idea goes with it. Take it out of a Mediterranean one and you still have a table.

How the Mediterranean Traveled to Palm Beach

Anyone who lives between New York, Connecticut and Florida already knows this distinction, even if nobody has named it.

Palm Beach is useful precisely because it is not on the Mediterranean. It shows how far Mediterranean ideas could travel and still hold together as a design language. Beginning with the Everglades Club in 1918, Addison Mizner established the Mediterranean Revival vocabulary that came to define much of the island: courtyards, stucco, tile, ceramics, metalwork and references gathered from across the Mediterranean, Spanish and Italian above all, with Moorish borrowings among them. The companies he founded the following year went on to make much of the tile, pottery and ironwork that finished the houses that came after.

None of it is blue and white, and it stands five thousand miles from the sea it refers to.

So a house in Palm Beach or Coral Gables stays coastal by geography and becomes Mediterranean Revival by choice. One comes from where the house is. The other comes from what was brought into it. The table inside works the same way, and knowing which of the two you are setting is most of the decision.

Our Own Motifs, Sorted Honestly

The distinction is easier to see on a catalogue than in the abstract, so here is ours.

Coastal and Mediterranean at once

Sardines, coral and aqua coral come from the water and from a kitchen: a sardine is a fish, and it is also dinner in Naples. They belong to both vocabularies without effort, which makes them the safest thing to buy if you are not sure which table you are setting.

Coastal before it is Mediterranean

The crab, the jellyfish and the turtle. Take these out of the Mediterranean and they still read as the sea. Put them on an American coastal table and nothing looks out of place, which is exactly what makes them coastal first.

Mediterranean once you put them in context

Lemons belong to the Mediterranean landscape on their own: a lemon says Amalfi without saying beach. The bee, the lavender and the dragonfly are broader than that, and they live everywhere. What makes them Mediterranean here is the collection they sit in, which looks at the cultivated land behind the coast rather than at the water.

Neither

The whole of Cortina: edelweiss, ibex, fox, skier. High rock, snow and a different half of the country.

One Collection Contains the Whole Argument

Collezione Toscana makes the point on its own, which we did not plan and are glad about.

Coral, aqua coral and the turtle look at the water. The bee, the lavender and the dragonfly look inland, at fields, hives and kitchen gardens. Tuscany holds both, which is why one collection ends up containing the whole distinction.

One region, one collection, two vocabularies. If Mediterranean meant the sea, half of Tuscany would be disqualified.

Italian Is Not a Synonym for Mediterranean Either

And this is where the word usually breaks, because outside Italy the two are treated as the same thing.

Cortina d'Ampezzo is Italian. It sits at 1,224 meters, among rock, snow and larch. A table there has nothing Mediterranean about it: the food is different, the light is different, the materials are different, and the only thing shared with Amalfi is the passport.

We make both, from the same linen and with the same hands. That is the clearest evidence we have that Mediterranean is a place rather than a nationality, and that coastal is a relationship rather than a style you can buy in a color.

Which One Are You Actually Setting?

It is worth knowing, because the two want different things from you.

If you are after a coastal table, keep it light and keep it spare. Pale ground, natural fiber, one marine reference and no more. A crab or a jellyfish embroidered at the edge of a napkin will carry the whole idea, and a second marine object will start to look like a theme.

If you are after a Mediterranean table, let it get fuller. More plates, more ceramic, bread out, oil on the table, something growing in a jug. The linen can go warmer than you expect, and the motif can come from a garden rather than the water.

And if what you want is the Amalfi lunch that put the idea in your head, you want both, which is the easiest of the three to get right.