The question GRAU's Pool Apartment 2 keeps posing is a simple one: what if a single colour did all the organisational work? Not colour on the walls, or on the furniture, or applied as accent — but colour on the structural elements that run through the entire plan. One blue beam at ceiling height, one blue column it meets, and suddenly the apartment has a register that the eye follows from room to room before the floor plan is even understood. We kept returning to the images because the logic holds at every scale.
© Matej Hakár
The apartment sits at ground level, opening onto a garden on one side and organised around an open plan that resists conventional room divisions. The floor throughout is terrazzo — cream-toned, reflective, uninterrupted. The walls are white. The cabinetry and built-in storage are pale plywood. The furniture is grey. The palette, assembled with obvious deliberateness, asks nothing of the eye. And then the blue arrives.
A continuous beam painted in a dense cobalt runs the length of the ceiling. Below it, a round column in the same blue meets it at the point where the structure needs it. Together they form a datum — an architectural line that identifies where the building's weight is carried and, in doing so, maps the zones of the plan without a wall in sight.
© Matej Hakár
The beam and column read differently depending on where you are in the apartment. From the living end they frame the passage toward the kitchen. From the kitchen they mark the boundary of the dining zone. From the threshold of the bedroom corridor they appear as a distant anchor, drawing the eye through the whole length of the plan. The blue earns its keep at every distance.
"The colour isn't decorating the apartment. It's running it — marking where the structure is, and the structure defining how the space flows."
© Matej Hakár
Up close, the blue reveals itself as a specific choice rather than a generic one. It is neither the navy of a dark interior nor the sky-blue of a Scandinavian reference — it sits in the register of a cobalt that reads clearly without aggression, saturated enough to hold the room but not so deep that it pulls the ceiling down. Against the terrazzo it is crisp. Against the plywood it is cool. Against the white walls it is simply itself.
© Matej Hakár
The plywood door frames create a secondary spatial layer — warm-toned thresholds that make the white-and-blue interior feel deliberately stage-managed. From the doorway, the full depth of the apartment is visible: terrazzo running to the garden, the blue column sitting calmly in the middle distance, the clothing rack and curtains completing a domestic tableau that manages to feel both curated and lived-in. The skateboard against the wall is not incidental.
© Matej Hakár
A curved internal partition — smooth, white, floor-to-ceiling — sweeps across one end of the open plan, creating a soft division between the dining area and the more private bedroom zone. The curve is the only overtly gestural move in an otherwise rectilinear plan, and it works precisely because it doesn't announce itself: the blue beam above runs straight through it, and the terrazzo below continues uninterrupted. The curve softens; the blue organises. They don't compete.
"A curved partition and a straight beam. The apartment holds both without resolving them into each other — and the tension between them is exactly where the spatial interest lives."
© Matej Hakár
The art throughout the apartment picks up on the blue in ways that read as intentional rather than coincidental. A blue geometric wall piece in the dining area. Paintings that carry blue in their palettes. The colour moves between structure and object, between architecture and collection, without either register dominating. It is a calibration that takes some nerve to hold — one wrong piece and the logic dissolves — but GRAU holds it.
© Matej Hakár
"The beam appears above the wardrobe zone with the same authority it has in the living room. The blue doesn't save itself for the impressive spaces — it claims every part of the plan equally."
© Matej Hakár
Why SILCO HAUS selected this project
When we came across Pool Apartment 2, what held our attention was the economy of the decision. GRAU didn't distribute colour across surfaces or rooms — they applied it once, to the elements that hold the building up, and let that single gesture carry the entire interior. The beam and the column are not decorative insertions. They are the architecture, made legible by colour.
SILCO HAUS curates from the position that colour performs its most rigorous work when it is structural rather than applied — when it produces the spatial reading rather than confirming one already made by other means. Pool Apartment 2 makes that argument in one of its purest residential forms. The blue is a datum. Everything else is the plan it organises.
| Project | Pool Apartment 2 |
| Studio | GRAU Architects |
| Location | Slovakia |
| Year | 2023 |
| Photography | © Matej Hakár |
| Programme | Residential apartment renovation |
| Materials | Terrazzo floor, plywood, white painted walls, painted steel beam and column |
