Green and blue are neighbours on the spectrum. Close enough to feel like they belong together — and distinct enough that, in the right hands, each holds its own.
This is not a guide to matching colours. The three spaces in this edit do not match. Casa Carabanchel uses mint green as a continuous spatial line. The Elevation of a Family House assigns lime green and cornflower blue to separate structural systems. The Riverside Tower Duplex places a mint green dining table and a steel-blue staircase inside a raw concrete shell and lets them coexist without explanation.
What these rooms share is the understanding that green and blue do not need to harmonise in order to work together. They need to be precise — in tone, in surface, in the role each is asked to play. When that precision is there, the pairing feels inevitable. When it is not, it reads as coincidence.
SILCOHAUS curates colour the way a structural engineer reads load. These three rooms demonstrate what happens when green and blue are each given a job to do.
Riverside Tower Duplex
Studio Okami (@studiookami) · Antwerp, Belgium
Architect Bram Van Cauter transformed a 1970s duplex in Antwerp's Riverside Tower into a raw and considered living space. The intervention begins with subtraction: the interior was stripped back to sandblasted concrete, and a stainless steel wall unit — referencing Donald Judd's furniture — was installed to contain all appliances and services within a single monolithic surface.
© Matthijs van der Burgt
Against this concrete and steel ground, two colour decisions sit at opposite ends of the duplex's spatial sequence. A mint green dining table — Maarten van Severen aluminium chairs paired with a painted surface — occupies the lower level as a piece of furniture that functions as a colour statement. A steel-blue spiral staircase connects the two levels, its dynamic form carrying the eye upward through the raw shell.
The mint and the blue do not share a level. They are separated by the vertical distance of the staircase itself — which is to say, the blue is the thing that connects the floor where the mint sits to the floor above. The two colours are in conversation across the full height of the apartment, mediated by the concrete and steel that surrounds them both.
© Matthijs van der Burgt
Van Cauter has spoken about placing colour on objects rather than surfaces, so the Brutalist shell remains a constant backdrop and colour decisions can shift over time. The mint green table and the sky blue staircase are not commitments to a palette. They are arguments about what furniture and infrastructure can do when colour is treated as authorship rather than decoration.
The mint green table and the sky blue staircase never share a frame. They are in conversation across the full height of the apartment.
Elevation of a Family House
127af (@127_a_f) · Bagnolet, France
The Elevation of a Family House is a residential project where colour is used to make structure legible. Lime green identifies one building system — the volume, the frame, the mass. Cornflower blue identifies another — the staircase, the threshold, the connective tissue between levels.
© Filip Dujardin
The two colours never share a surface. They occupy adjacent planes and complementary roles, which is precisely why the combination works: each colour has a clear assignment, and the eye reads the building's logic through the contrast between them.
This is a meaningful distinction from colour-blocking, which tends to divide space into zones. Here, green and blue do not divide — they differentiate. The house is made of two structural systems that happen to require different colours to become readable. The colour choice is not aesthetic. It is explanatory.
© Filip Dujardin
The tonal relationship between lime green and cornflower blue matters too. Neither is a neutral — both carry chromatic weight. Their proximity on the warm-cool axis creates tension without conflict, which is the condition the project needs to hold the two systems in the same frame without one dominating.
Two colours, two structural roles, no surface where they overlap. That is the spatial argument the project is built around.
Casa Carabanchel
Extrarradio (@extrarradio.es) · Madrid, Spain
Casa Carabanchel is a residential renovation in the Carabanchel district of Madrid. Extrarradio's intervention works with the existing plan rather than against it — the spatial sequence of kitchen, staircase, and bathroom is retained, but unified through a single chromatic decision: mint green, applied as a continuous line across all three zones.
© Germán Saiz
The mint reads differently in each room. In the kitchen it lands on cabinetry and tiling — a surface decision tied to function. On the staircase it becomes structural, the riser and balustrade forming a zigzag path of colour that climbs between levels. In the bathroom it returns to tile, this time enclosing the room as a field rather than a line.
The blue enters quietly — in fittings, in shadow, in the sky visible through the windows. It does not compete with the mint. It gives the mint something to read against.
© Germán Saiz
What Extrarradio demonstrates is that a single colour can carry the spatial logic of an entire apartment without becoming monotonous — provided it is allowed to change what it is applied to. The mint at Casa Carabanchel is always the same colour. It is never the same surface twice.
The green is not a palette. It is a spatial thread that runs through the apartment and pulls three rooms into one coherent sequence.
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Green and blue do not need to match. They need to mean something — each on its own surface, each with its own role. These three rooms demonstrate that when the roles are clear, the pairing takes care of itself.
