Colour as Spatial Notation: The CAMBI Kids Club by Bodega Design

SILCO HAUS has long been interested in studios that treat colour as load-bearing — not applied after the spatial decisions are made, but doing the organising work itself. When we came across CAMBI Kids Club at Andaz Peninsula Papagayo, it was one of those projects where the argument was immediately clear in the images before we'd read a single word. We wanted to sit with it a little longer. This is that piece.

© Bodega Design | Photography: Leonardo Carvajal

A room designed for the right body

The Andaz Peninsula Papagayo sits on forty-two hectares of protected Pacific coastline in Guanacaste, Costa Rica — a resort where the landscape sets the terms and the buildings serve it. The CAMBI Kids Club is the resort's children's amenity: a programme type that in most hospitality contexts produces padded-wall enclosures and primary-colour furniture.

Bodega Design, the Costa Rican studio behind the project, treated the brief differently. Rather than designing a scaled-down version of adult leisure space, they built a fully resolved environment calibrated to a different body — one that occupies the room at a metre off the ground, moves through it differently, and reads spatial cues through colour before function.

© Bodega Design | Photography: Leonardo Carvajal

The plan organises into interlocking zones — each identifiable by colour before it can be identified by function. A sage-and-teal play kitchen at one end. An interactive play wall — its perforated surface filled with coloured shapes that children can rearrange at will — running the height of the room. A central activity table whose top is cast from recycled plastic sourced from The Recycle Studio, a materials company that processes industrial waste into usable slabs — the confetti aggregate suspended in a clear base is among the most technically and visually resolved surfaces in the project.

"A children's programme at a resort hotel is among the most demanding spatial briefs in hospitality: the designer must produce an environment convincing to two entirely different occupants — one at adult eye level, one at child eye level — without satisfying either through compromise."

© Bodega Design | Photography: Leonardo Carvajal

Green before anything else

The colour logic of CAMBI operates at the scale of the room, not the surface. Green — in three distinct registers — does the spatial work that conventional partition or flooring change would perform in a less considered interior. The sage tile of the kitchen, the bottle green of the circulation arch, the teal of the play surfaces: together they form a notation system readable without instruction. You know where the kitchen is before you reach it.

The primary circulation threshold is marked by a dark green glossy arch letterform — a formal intervention that sits between signage and architecture, between furniture and threshold. It does not divide the space so much as propose a division; the programme operates on both sides simultaneously.

© Bodega Design | Photography: Leonardo Carvajal

"In CAMBI, you know where the kitchen is before you reach it. Green is not on the wall — green is the wall's argument."

Above, clusters of Akari-style paper lanterns descend at variable heights, modulating the ceiling plane without coffers or changes in level. A layered-acrylic wall sconce marks the reading corner at the room's quieter end — diffused and warm against the more assertive greens of the tile and arch.

© Bodega Design | Photography: Leonardo Carvajal

The table as material statement

The recycled plastic tops sourced from The Recycle Studio are the room's most declarative surface. The production process — sorting, cleaning, and heat-pressing waste plastic into slabs — leaves a visible aggregate that reads as texture before it reads as material story. Rounded edges throughout the furniture programme soften the industrial register without domesticating it.

Metal, wood, and melamine complete the palette. No single material dominates; each performs its role without demanding attention independently. The result is an interior in which the material argument is legible without being laboured, and where sustainability operates as spatial intelligence rather than declaration.

"The confetti aggregate is not a decorative gesture toward sustainability. It is the most visually complex surface in the room — a material record of industrial waste made structural."

PROJECT	CAMBI Kids Club
STUDIO	Bodega Design
LOCATION	Peninsula Papagayo, Costa Rica
CLIENT	Andaz Peninsula Papagayo
YEAR	2026
PROGRAMME	Children's Club, Hospitality
MATERIALS	Metal, recycled plastic (The Recycle Studio), wood, melamine
COLOUR PALETTE	Sage green, bottle green, teal, yellow, terracotta
PHOTOGRAPHY	Leonardo Carvajal

WHY SILCO HAUS SELECTED THIS PROJECT

SILCO HAUS curates from the position that colour, at its most rigorous, performs structural work — not the decoration of a space already organised, but the primary means of organisation itself. CAMBI makes that argument in full, in a programme type — the children's club — where the temptation to resolve spatial logic through visual noise is strongest. Bodega Design resisted it without producing neutrality.

The recycled plastic tabletops add a further dimension. The choice to deploy The Recycle Studio's material at the room's primary work surface — rather than as accent or trim — is the kind of material intelligence that distinguishes a project from a brief well executed. CAMBI is both.