CAUS (color association of the united states)

"Wassily Kandinsky's abstract paintings influenced the colourful yet understated interiors that design studio Holloway Li has created inside the Locke hotel in Munich.

The aparthotel, called Wunderlocke, contains 360 serviced studio apartments and is situated in Munich's Obersendling district, taking over an office building that previously belonged to German tech company Siemens. London-based Holloway Li aimed to celebrate the building's raw structure and reveal its 'inner voice', avoiding a more traditional 'material intensive' approach to retrofitting.

This decision was chiefly informed by the work of 20th-century Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky – a pioneer of abstract art who spent a significant portion of his career in Munich.'Kandinsky's work explores how we can develop a closer relationship to nature through abstraction, rather than through more figurative approaches favoured at the time,' explained Holloway Li.

'He believed that by connecting with the 'innerer klang' (inner voice) of things, an artist could reveal the natural essence of objects and materials.' In line with this idea, the studio stripped back the building to its concrete shell and added a carefully curated selection of furnishings using natural colours and materials where possible.

At the heart of the ground-floor reception is a curved timber desk inset with panels of wheat-coloured carpet, which were also used to wrap the lower half of the room's structural columns." - Read full article by Natasha Levy on | photography is by

Some most excellent color work by ✨

This week's CAUS Library Pick is "Inside, At Home with Great Designers," available for pre-order by Editors, a stunning collection of the homes of sixty celebrated contemporary global designers and decorators.

"The homes of interior designers are the places where all the knowledge and decorating expertise they have perfected can be seen in their fullest expression. Inside: At Home with Great Designers is a private tour of the homes of sixty of the most talented and accomplished creatives working in the design world today.

This revelatory book allows us unique insight into how and where designers live and showcases an inspiring and aspirational kaleidoscope of homes around the world.

Features top contemporary interior designers and decorators in the US, the UK, France, Italy, and many other countries across the world and the homes of such leading international design talents as Brigette Romanek, Roman and Williams, Sheila Bridges, Darryl Carter, Sig Bergamin, and Joseph Dirand.

Homes included range from apartments, townhouses, and lofts, to country and coastal retreats, bungalows, and palazzi - this is the perfect gift and inspiration for a house-and-design-obsessed global readership." -

Another Couture season has come and gone, and of course, there were some brilliant standouts (here's looking at you, Schiaparelli), but we were entranced by the colors and finishes that dazzled on the travertine Spanish Steps last week for Valentino's Fall 2022 Couture show. We noticed many colors we accurately forecasted for the season, but as envisioned, a deeply-hued red continues to be the anchor color of the season.

"Pierpaolo Piccioli is at ease in the world of couture. He approaches the metier with consummate confidence, and the record of his memorable shows grows longer by the season. Today he just threaded another pearl in his repertoire, staging the fall Valentino collection on Rome’s Spanish Steps, an almost sacred place so dense in strata of history, meaning, and symbolism that it has become a sort of meta-entity.

'This is a deeply personal collection, because it’s all about the history of Valentino,' Piccioli said at a pre-show press conference, held at the label’s headquarters in Piazza Mignanelli. ...'A radical vision goes against all the anti-democratic idiocies the world is throwing at us,” he said. “Being assertive in creating beauty isn’t escapism, but the only way of fighting conservatism. And giving a stage to people who are considered at the periphery for me is a duty. This morning, when I was looking at the Spanish Steps during the rehearsals,' he went on, 'I had the same feeling of when I was left out of the barriers. When you live at the periphery, so to speak, your perspective is different. You can look at the big picture without being seduced by it, keeping a safe distance, and a cool eye. I still want to stay in that place, outside the fences.'" - Read the full commentary on by Tiziana Cardini








#'PalazzoMignanelli

You know we love a green kitchen and interiors with playful uses of color. "A pop-up guest bedroom features in this open-plan apartment by Studio Noju, which was renovated to create the illusion of having separate spaces and dressed in colours that nod to its Seville location.

Casa Triana is a 60-square-metre apartment renovation in the Triana neighbourhood of Seville, southern Spain.

It is the debut collaborative project by architects Antonio Mora and Eduardo Tazón, who co-founded their firm Studio Noju – a shortening of 'not just.'

Each area of Casa Triana is distinguished by its own jagged colourful alcove made from readily available and low-cost roof ridges, known as "cumbreras" in Spanish.

The ridges are typically used to cap gabled roofs in traditional construction projects. Studio Noju placed the horizontal V-shaped ridges next to each other vertically to delineate these distinctive spaces.

'We created the alcoves with the idea of 'architectural texture,' which gives them a distinctive three-dimensional backdrop, creating an interesting play of light and shadows while giving depth to the space," said Mora and Tazón." - full article on by Jane Englefield | Images:

A colorful welcome to the week ahead, we had to repost this stunning image by | She said, "Fell in love with San Juan La Lago 💛 Naturally dyed skeins hanging at Casa Flor Ixcaco. Ix means “women” in Mayan Kaqchikel, and caco means cacao" 💛

This week's CAUS Library Pick is "Colors of Art: The Story of Art in 80 Palettes" by Chloë Ashby, available for pre-order on August 30, 2022.

"It takes the reader on a journey through history via 80 carefully curated artworks and their palettes. For these pieces, color is not only a tool (like a paintbrush or a canvas) but the fundamental secret to their success.

Color allows artists to express their individuality, evoke certain moods, and portray positive or negative subliminal messages. And throughout history the greatest of artists have experimented with new pigments and new technologies to lead movements and deliver masterpieces. But, as something so cardinal, we sometimes forget how poignant color palettes can be, and how much they can tell us.

When Vermeer painted The Milkmaid, the amount of ultramarine he could use was written in the contract. How did that affect how he used it? When Turner experimented with Indian Yellow, he captured roaring flames that brought his paintings to life. If he had used a more ordinary yellow, would he have created something so extraordinary? And how did Warhol throw away the rulebook to change what color could achieve?

Structured chronologically, Colors of Art provides a fun, intelligent, and visually engaging look at the greatest artistic palettes in art history – from Rafael’s use of perspective and Vermeer’s ultramarine, to Andy Warhol’s hot pinks, and Lisa Brice’s blue women.

Colors of Art offers a refreshing take on the subject and acts as a primer for artists, designers, and art lovers who want to look at art history from a different perspective."

"In Ancient Greece in 530 BCE, visitors to the grave of a young boy and girl would have gazed toward the sky and seen a brightly painted sphinx perched atop the 13-foot marble stele that marked the children’s final resting place.

The stele and sphinx, on display as part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, appear just like the other sculptures in the museum’s sun-lit halls — a stark white. But a new exhibition, Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, showcases the sphinx in its original vibrant form, one of 14 painted reconstructions of Ancient Greek and Roman statues. On view through March 23 of 2023, Chroma also highlights 40 other objects that contextualize polychromy, the painting of ancient sculpture and pottery.

Chroma is the outcome of an extensive collaboration between conservators, scientists, and curators who helped to create the replica of the sphinx. The exhibition’s other reconstructions were created by Vinzenz Brinkmann, head of antiquities at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt, and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann. The husband-and-wife team has studied polychromy for over 40 years. Their Gods in Color exhibition has been touring since 2003, and their replicas have been included in museums around the world.

Instead of relegating the colorful reconstructions to a separate gallery space, the works at the Met are interspersed within the museum’s iconic ancient sculpture halls, with a small upstairs gallery dedicated entirely to the show. Throughout the exhibition, labels explain the scientific process for determining the statues’ true colors.

Chroma is the outcome of an extensive collaboration between conservators, scientists, and curators who helped to create the replica of the sphinx. The exhibition’s other reconstructions were created by Vinzenz Brinkmann, head of antiquities at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt, and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann. The husband-and-wife team has studied polychromy for over 40 years. Their Gods in Color exhibition has been touring since 2003, and their replicas have been included in museums around the world." Text/images by Elaine Velie for Fifth Avenue

"Texas-based jeweler Sarah Murphy has turned her papier-maché hobby into a full-blown collection of lamps, which are more refined but also more whimsical, with tiny bulbs emerging from monolithic structures and flat appendages bulging from the bases. The lamps are mostly monochromatic, with checkers and stripes thrown in for good measure, and include funny details like pullchains and finials in the same color and materials palette." Visit Murphy’s website for more info - by Jill Singer for | Photos by

"Dior is transporting Montauk visitors to the French Riviera this summer with its first beauty and couture pop-up in America.

Debuted Friday morning, the collaboration came to life in the form of a curated boutique and spa experience inside the beach town's premier resort, Gurney's Montauk.

The shop is divided into a blue room and an orange room, both featuring new designs from Maria Grazia Chiuri's Dioriviera capsule collection, including an orange-and-ivory-striped summer knit top, the canvas Dior book tote in fluorescent blue toile de Jouy, a fringed poncho, and a breezy bright pink shirt dress also in the iconic print. The motif is revisited throughout the collection, modernized and often inverted to create elegant contrasts. Outside the boutique, on the resort's outer deck overlooking the ocean, Dior has created a Mediterranean oasis in which toile de Jouy is the new neutral and Dior Eden-Roc adds a woodsy essence to the sea breeze. The lounge area is adorned with Dior umbrellas and lounge chairs, as well as wild animal sculptures pulled straight out of the French fashion house's timeless motif ..." - by Rosa Sanchez for | Photos by

The pop-up is open through September 5.

In honor of Sam Gilliam, this week's CAUS Library Pick is "Fugues in Color" available for pre-order. Edited by , the book was published to accompany the exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton from 27 April-28 August 2022. A stunning exhibition catalog, it reunites international contemporary artists around their usage of color.

"The exhibition brings together five contemporary artists of international stature: (United States, 1933), (Germany, 1961), (United States, 1958-2005), (Canada, 1985), (Switzerland / France, 1937). Their works are characterized by expansive use of color, which emerges from canvas to invade walls, floors, and ceilings. Within the FLV, each of these artists will have a dedicated space. This book presents in an exhaustive way the works of the exhibition. Organized in five main parts, each being dedicated to an artist, it mixes texts by specialists and interviews with artists.

Under the direction of Ludovic Delalande, Nathalie Ogé and Claire Staebler, with texts by great specialists in contemporary art: Jonathan P. Binstock, Philippe Dagen, Frank Gehry, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Florence Ostende, and Ludger Schwarte."

The world lost an incredible artist and human being last Saturday. "Sam Gilliam, whose draping, color-drenched canvases insisted on the radical potential of abstraction, died at the age of 88.

Emerging at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a time when many Black American artists harnessed figuration to represent their reality and spur social change, Gilliam did not just pursue non-representational art but managed to turn it on its head. Inspired in part by women he saw hanging laundry on clotheslines from his studio window, he freed the canvas from the stretcher for his pivotal "Drape" paintings, suspending them from the ceiling or on the wall in sensual configurations that embrace the organic folds of fabric. It was the zenith of American postwar painting: Abstract Expressionism, the New York School, and the Color Field movement collided in a frenzy of drips, splashes, and egos, mostly those of a rather male and White coterie of artists. Gilliam, along with contemporaries like Howardena Pindell and Alma Thomas, made their mark on the medium while asserting the creative autonomy of Black artists in the United States." - full article by Valentina Di Liscia for

+ Sam Gilliam, Close to Trees (detail), 2011. Acrylic on polypropylene. Image courtesy of Sam Gilliam.

+ Installation view of "Sam Gilliam: 1967–1973 at Mnuchin Gallery. Photography Tom Powel Imaging. Artwork © Sam Gilliam

+ Sam Gilliam, “Green April” (1969), acrylic on canvas, 98 x 271 x 3 7/8 inches, collection of Kunstmuseum Basel (photo by Lee Thompson)

+ Sam Gilliam, “Seahorses” 1975, Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo by Johansen Krause)

+ Sam Gilliam, “10/27/69” (1969), acrylic on canvas installation, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio

+ Sam Gilliam