Color of the Year, Texture of the Millenia
How Meoded Lime Plaster Deepens Benjamin Moore’s Most Influential Hues
Every year, Benjamin Moore’s Color of the Year sparks a new design conversation—an inflection point that captures cultural mood and guides palettes across residential, commercial, and hospitality interiors. Their 2026 direction, featured in Architectural Digest, once again affirms Benjamin Moore’s undeniable role as an arbiter of color and an influential voice in how we experience space. As a designer myself, I deeply admire the sophistication, emotional intelligence, and relevance of their palette-building.
But color alone is only half the story.
A hue fully reveals its character when it interacts with a surface that carries light, absorbs shadow, and expresses depth. This is where lime plasters—materials that have been used since antiquity—powerfully reshape the way we perceive contemporary colors.
Colors like Benjamin Moore’s Silhouette, already rich and complex as a paint, take on an entirely new identity when applied as Meoded’s Stucco Lamundo or Marmorino Tintoretto.
Silhouette is beautiful on a paint deck: moody charcoal softened by plum undertones, sophisticated without feeling cold, dramatic without collapsing into black. But when translated into lime plaster, its behavior transforms. The interaction between pigment, mineral texture, and light introduces dimension that paint simply cannot achieve.
With Stucco Lamundo, a high-gloss Venetian plaster, the color evolves into something almost stone-like. Light grazes the polished surface and reveals micro-variations in tone—pockets of deeper shadow, ribbons of unexpected warmth, and a luminous satin movement that shifts throughout the day. The finish feels architectural, sculptural, and atmospheric, as if the color has been pulled from carved basalt or burnished marble rather than created in a can.
With Marmorino Tintoretto, the finish becomes matte, velvety, and quietly enveloping. Silhouette’s undertones soften; its coolness warms; its depth expands. Because Tintoretto diffuses light rather than reflecting it, the color reads with a suede-like softness—warmer, more cultural, more rooted in place. A hue that might feel “painted” on drywall becomes a surface with soul.
This is the essential distinction: lime plaster does not merely display color—it interprets it.
It gives today’s influential hues the gift of movement, texture, and the subtle irregularities that make a color feel lived-in, timeless, and materially grounded.
Benjamin Moore may set the palette for the moment, but lime plaster provides the texture of the millenia—a medium that connects contemporary design to centuries of craftsmanship.
In a design climate increasingly focused on sensory experience, material honesty, and timelessness, Meoded plasters offer a way to take an annual trend and anchor it in something enduring, architectural, and emotionally resonant.
If you’d like to explore how colors like Silhouette translate into Stucco Lamundo or Marmorino Tintoretto, our Specifier Concierge team can prepare custom samples for your next project.
Hoping you find your finish.
