Hosted by Colour: Raw Color Shapes Ambiente 2027 with ‘Shades’

Colour rarely waits to be noticed.

Colour directs the eye, changes the mood of a room and quietly influences the way we move through a space. At Ambiente 2027, it becomes something more: a host.

Eindhoven-based design studio Raw Color, founded by Daniera ter Haar and Christoph Brach, has been named Ambiente Designer 2027 and will transform the Interior Design & Architecture Hub in Hall 3.1 with Shades — a walk-in installation exploring the relationship between colour, light, shadow, material and spatial experience.

The premise is deceptively simple. Colour never really exists in isolation. It shifts according to its surroundings, changes under different light and gains intensity or restraint through the colours placed beside it.

“Colours are never alone. They need company and it is like a recipe where it is all about finding the right balance,” say ter Haar and Brach.
For hospitality interiors in particular, Raw Color proposes an evocative idea: colour as the first host. Before a guest encounters a person, a table or a service ritual, colour can already be at work — establishing atmosphere, creating orientation and intuitively guiding movement through a space.

The Art of Shades

The title of Raw Color’s installation carries a deliberate double meaning: shades as variations of colour, and shades as protection from the sun.
At the centre of the concept is the canopy, a familiar architectural element in hotels and restaurants. Its significance here extends beyond shelter. A canopy creates shadow; shadow alters light; and light determines how colour is perceived.

Colour, after all, exists because of light. Remove light and colour loses its meaning. Remove shade, Raw Color suggests, and colour risks becoming overwhelming.

It is within that tension that Shades takes shape.

The Interior Design & Architecture Hub will combine subtle chromatic details with more assertive fields of colour, creating a spatial rhythm between intimacy and openness. Compact, elevated areas rendered in darker tones are designed to feel more enclosed, encouraging visitors to pause and explore curated Ambiente products. At ground level, larger spaces create the opposite sensation: openness, encounter and interaction.

The result is intended to be experienced rather than simply observed — an environment where colour, form and texture work together to shape behaviour and atmosphere.

A Language Built in Colour

Colour has long been central to Raw Color’s practice.

Working across disciplines, ter Haar and Brach combine graphics, photography and product design while experimenting with the ways colour and form interact with different materials. The studio’s approach is both intuitive and experimental, resulting in a visual language characterised by directness and energy.

Since establishing Raw Color, the designers have undertaken international projects for companies and institutions including Adidas, Hermès, IKEA, Kvadrat, Samsung and the Van Gogh Museum. Their work has been exhibited internationally, while selected pieces have entered collections including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

At Ambiente, that multidisciplinary sensibility moves into an architectural setting. Instead of treating colour as a finishing layer applied to a completed interior, Shades positions it as a fundamental component of spatial design.

Colour becomes orientation. Colour becomes atmosphere. Colour becomes invitation.

A Hub for Ideas – and Encounters

Raw Color’s installation forms part of a wider ambition for the Interior Design & Architecture Hub: to bring the worlds of interior design, architecture, hospitality and international contract business into closer conversation.

“With Ambiente Projects, we are strategically developing Ambiente further for the international contract business,” says Julia Uherek, Vice President Consumer Goods Fairs, Messe Frankfurt.

The aim is to identify relevant developments in interior design, connect them with products and solutions presented by Ambiente exhibitors, and create opportunities for inspiration, knowledge transfer and personal exchange.

Within the Hub, a curated selection of exhibitor products will sit alongside an integrated Academy developed with partners including AIT Dialog, bdia, ECIA, the German Design Council, Office Roxx from Prima Vier Verlag and World-Architects.

Together, these elements establish the Hub as a meeting point for interior architects, interior designers, architects, hospitality experts, contract furnishers and the international specialist retail trade.

Raw Color follows Elena Salmistraro, Fabian Freytag and Katty Schiebeck in putting an individual design signature on the Hub — continuing Ambiente’s tradition of inviting an internationally recognised design personality to offer a new perspective on interiors and hospitality.

For 2027, that perspective begins with one of design’s most immediate yet complex tools.

Not an object; not a material.

Colour.

And in Raw Color’s hands, it is not simply there to decorate the room. It tells us where to go, where to gather and perhaps, for a moment, where to stay.

AMBIENTE 2027

Interior Design & Architecture Hub
Hall 3.1 · Frankfurt exhibition grounds
Ambiente & Christmasworld
29 January–2 February 2027
Creativeworld
29 January–1 February 2027
Compass Talks
28 January 2027