Color isn’t chosen. It reveals itself. Gon Architects

Almost nobody starts a renovation by talking about color.

First come the square footage, the layout, the budget, where the kitchen goes, if there's room for an island. Color usually comes later, almost like a final coat: now that everything is decided, what color should we make it?

With GONarchitects, it doesn't work exactly like that.

Not because color is the first thing they decide, but because before getting to it, they have done something else: understood how the person in front of them actually lives. And, often, dismantled a few preconceived ideas they brought from home about how their house shouldbe.

Before designing, ask

The first meeting begins with questions. Many of them.

Do you cook every day? Elaborate meals or something quick? Do you have an immersion blender? Do you work from home? How many people eat dinner together in a normal week? Who cooks? Who never goes near the stove?

"We try not to ask about what they want. But rather about how they already live."

At first, it might feel almost like a questionnaire. But little by little, the conversation opens up and the things that really matter start to appear: what is always left on the countertop, where everyone ends up when friends come over, who needs silence to work, or which space in the house is barely used.

And ideas that no one had stopped to question also emerge.

"Many people arrive with inherited family baggage. For example: every house must have a dining room. And suddenly you say: there doesn't have to be a dining room."

It might seem like a small decision. It is not.

Because as soon as the "this has to be here because it has always been here" mindset disappears, other possibilities appear. And that is precisely where the project begins.

What if you could ask for anything?

At some point in the process, GONarchitects asks another question: if you could ask for anything for your home, what would you ask for?

Without thinking yet about square meters, budget, or whether it’s reasonable.

A swimming pool in a downtown Madrid apartment. A room dedicated solely to watching movies. A moving island. A sliding door capable of making an entire part of the house disappear.

"We tell them the list can be as long as they want. Later, if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit."

Evidently, not everything ends up being built. It’s not necessary, either.

What is interesting is what lies behind each request. Perhaps you can’t have that pool, but wanting it says something about the type of home you imagine. About how you want to rest, host people, or spend your time.

Sometimes, a seemingly impossible wish provides more information than ten practical questions.

So, when is the color decided?

Here is the funny thing: there is no meeting to choose it.

There is no day on the calendar when everyone sits around a table with twenty samples and has to decide between blue, red, or white.

"The color appears. We don't force it."

It may appear very early or quite late. Sometimes the client arrives saying they want a blue countertop and that does not change from day one. Other times, they need to see how the work progresses to understand what the space calls for.

To make it easier, GONarchitects works with photomontages over photographs of the actual project. Or they take their clients to visit previous projects, houses that have already been lived in for some time.

Because a ten-centimeter sample tells you very little about what it is like to live with a color.

"In photos, you can see it. But seeing it in person, you see how it feels to have that color."

And that is where the conversation changes.

You are no longer trying to imagine a blue from a color chart. You are seeing it in natural light, next to wood, occupying several meters and forming part of a real house.

Suddenly, it feels a lot less scary.

The problem with having 200 saved references

Pinterest helps. Until it stops helping.

It is common to arrive at a renovation with folders full of references: a kitchen from here, flooring from there, a lamp from another house, that shade of green that popped up on Instagram six months ago.

The problem is that each image belongs to a different space. It has different lighting, a different ceiling height, different materials, and, above all, a different person living inside.

"You see the house when it's finished and you say: this is pure Pinterest. You took it from a photo and it doesn't look the same for you."

Copying the blue from a kitchen you like doesn't guarantee that that blue will work in yours.

For GONarchitects, color must respond to the project just as the layout or a material does. It is not there because it looked pretty in a reference.

"It’s not a whim, neither ours nor theirs. It is more about spatial qualification."

Perhaps that is the difference between choosing a color and arriving at it.

Five years later

There is a pretty good test to know if a decision worked: going back years later.

GONarchitects does it.

In Series Revisitedthey return to some of the houses they designed five years ago and photograph them again. They are no longer newly finished projects. They are lived-in houses, with objects, routines, and years behind them.

And there is something that particularly catches their attention.

"No one has painted what we said they could paint. They are all, in essence, the same."

Perhaps because, when color does not stem from a trend or a reference saved on Pinterest, it is much harder to get tired of it.

It wasn't chosen because a color had to be decided.

It was arrived at.

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