Cloud Dancer: the Pantone Colour of the Year is the new neutral shade for interior design

It goes well with everything, especially with the Fap collections: this is the new Pantone colour of the year 2026

A colour that encourages true relaxation and focus, allowing the mind to wander and creativity to breathe, making room for innovation.

Laurie Pressman, Vice President of the Pantone Color Institute

2026 is denoted by chromatic lightness of touch with Cloud Dancer, the new Pantone colour of the year. An ethereal, versatile, luminous shade, imbued with light and a sense of balance, that harmonises attractively with every colour palette and interior design style.

Cloud Dancer: making neutral colour contemporary

The Pantone colour of the year has always shaped design trends, influencing the materials, finishes and moods of home design.
This year, Pantone has surprised us with an unexpected colour, a neutral white that seems to embody a deeply felt, shared need for serenity, purity and harmony.

A perfect shade for creating airy interiors and highlighting characterful surfaces, which dialogues perfectly with the textures, materials and finishes of the Fap collections, transforming every space into a unique, contemporary sensory experience.

The language of neutral white colour

The language of neutral white colour expresses purity, neutrality, order and balance. It communicates sensations of tranquillity, calm and peace, creating mental space and clarity.

It’s a kind of “visual silence” that responds to the saturation and speed typical of our age.

In fact, according to the Pantone Color Institute it serves as “a symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection". “It opens up space for creativity, allowing our imagination to drift so that new insights and bold ideas can emerge and take shape”.

In architecture and design, it enables the creation of spatial openings, pauses and hierarchies in compositions, augments interiors’ perceived size and airiness, and highlights the materials, textures and colours around it, thus also extending construction potentials.

Why Cloud Dancer goes well with everything

The new Pantone colour of the year 2026 goes well with everything because it’s classified as a neutral white, in spite of its rich shade variations.
Its actual hue is finely judged, midway between pale blue and ivory, so it’s not too cold. This chromatic balance makes it perfect for combinations with both warm and cool colours.

So in stylistic terms, the Pantone of the year 2026 is extremely adaptable, pairing well not only with natural colour palettes, woods, stones and metals but also with bright or saturated shades, providing a note of cleanliness and modernity.

It contributes a light airiness to interiors, illuminates space and emphasises the beauty of other colours or materials.
It’s particularly contemporary, ideal for minimalist, modern and luxurious interior designs. Perfect for white and 3D decorative walls.

Corrugated white and ceramic surfaces: colour becomes matter

Pantone 11-4201 Cloud Dancer isn’t a flat white: this dancer in the clouds is a chameleon-like shade that we like to combine with a corrugated white, with a wealth of slight variations and subtle, flowing relief patterning.

The colour of the year is easy to interpret in ceramics, in a variety of forms as vibrant, tactile and changeable as the Pantone shade itself.

Examples include Materia Pura, especially the Micro Bianco wall tile with its flawed micro relief motifs, or the Trama Bianco stoneware with its dense, almost cross-hatched texture.

Extremely tactile surfaces with a wealth of almost imperceptible yet all-important variations in colour.

The regular, corrugated white of Materia Classica Groove Bianco provides a softer, more sinuous interpretation of the standard ribbed white, and offers a more original, contemporary example of the ceramic boiserie panel.

It’s a versatile, tactile white, just like the colour of the year, which combines splendidly with warm shades and intense hues.

Combinations, trends and brick tiles

Nobu Raw White is the perfect combination of the Pantone colour of the year 2026 and the current trend for brick tiles.

A very attractive surface that’s also a delight to touch, which evokes and surpasses the standard brick concept with a continuous, irregular pattern.
Perfect both for modern and minimalist interiors and more classical design schemes.

Thanks to the Fap Ceramiche True Touch treatment, Materia Classica Bianco stoneware surfaces are smooth yet tactile, almost porous.

We close our survey of white ceramic coverings with Bloom Star White, an exceptionally original wall tile that, like the Pantone colour of the year 2026, has something celestial about it.
The craftsmen and designers who created this 3D effect drew their inspiration from the stars, giving form to their idea first on paper and then on ceramics to achieve an incredibly varied, playful, attractive look.

Future colour scenarios

In a design world increasingly oriented towards wellbeing and harmony, the Pantone 11‑4201 Cloud Dancer white is undoubtedly destined to take centre stage.
In floor and wall tiles the shade isn’t merely neutral: it becomes a luminous backdrop against which textures, materials and interactions with the light reach their full potential, for the creation of interiors with a mood of calm, balance and timeless modernity.

Looking to the future, we can expect white not to disappear but rather to be transformed into a creative tool, fully equipped to dialogue with any project or colour trend.