How to Use Bold Colour Without Overwhelming a Room: Vintage and Colour Lessons from Studio Atelier HA

By Curiouz OfficialNovember 10, 2026

A room can be full of colour and still feel calm. For Hugo and Adèle, founders of Paris interior architecture and design studio Atelier HA, the amount of colour matters less than how clearly each one is ranked and which finish carries it. Mirrors and steel then open up new perspectives, and vintage pieces keep the room from feeling too perfect.

Atelier HA recently curated ten pieces for the Curiouz From the Experts series. Here, the founders explain their approach to colour, reflection and sourcing, and how it shapes their homes in Pigalle and Saint-Cloud.

Key Takeaways from Atelier HA

Rank colours, don’t ration them. One sets the backdrop, one appears in chosen places, one interrupts.
Choose the finish with the hue. Lacquer, matte paint and textile turn one red into three different presences.
Use reflection for perspective, not just space. Mirrors and steel can fragment a view and show things together that would normally sit apart.
Make vintage reliable before it enters the scheme. Confirm dimensions, condition, location, delivery, restoration and availability up front.

A Paris Studio Without a House Style

Atelier HA has no house style, by design. The studio works across restaurants, hotels, public spaces, residential interiors and scenography, and treats each project as a world of its own. “We try to avoid applying a predefined Atelier HA style: the place itself, its history, its purpose and the people who will inhabit it should take us somewhere different each time,” the founders explain.

“Our work is very much driven by materials, colour, light, proportions and details,” they say. “We also draw inspiration from cinema, fashion and design, as well as from very different periods and eras.” The aim, in their words, is “to create spaces with a strong identity that still feel alive.”

Their homes in and around Paris show the range, with Pigalle and Saint-Cloud each built on its own palette rather than a signature look.

Colour Lessons: How to Use Bold Colour Without Overwhelming a Room

You rank the colours rather than limit them. “We don’t really think about balance in terms of the amount of colour,” say Hugo and Adèle. “A space can be extremely colourful and still feel very calm if the colours have a clear hierarchy and work coherently together.” Before choosing a single paint, give each colour a job:

A backdrop, the colour the room sits in.
An accent, the colour that appears only in chosen places.
A contrast, the colour that interrupts the pattern.

Finish is part of the colour. “A lacquered red, a red textile and a matte red have completely different presences,” the founders point out. In their Saint-Cloud project, red arrives as lacquer, on wardrobe doors with brass handles and on a bed platform, rather than as paint on the walls.

Materials can interrupt the palette too. “Stainless steel, mirrors, wood or stone can also create moments of breathing space between colours.” In the same house, a bottle green modular sofa sits in front of a brushed steel fireplace, and the steel gives the green room to breathe.

Three Palettes on the Studio’s Table

These are the combinations the founders keep returning to, with one way to cast each:

Vanilla, chocolate and chrome: vanilla as the backdrop, chocolate in upholstery or joinery, chrome in frames and lighting.
Deep red with mirror or stainless steel: red in one lacquered element, with mirror or steel repeating and fragmenting it.
Bottle green with cream or off-white: cream as the backdrop, bottle green in one deep, saturated piece.

Will a vivid palette still look good in ten years? It will if it belongs to the project rather than to a trend. The founders favour colours that are slightly muted, deep or difficult to define, or a very bold colour used with extreme precision. “A choice that is coherent with the project as a whole will age far better than a palette designed to follow a trend.”

Making a Small Space Feel Larger With Mirrors

Atelier HA’s answer reframes the question: a mirror is more useful for creating new perspectives than for adding apparent square metres. “With mirrors, we are less interested in making a space appear larger than in creating new perspectives, fragmenting an image, or allowing things that would not normally be visible together to appear simultaneously.”

The same thinking applies to colour and material. The founders are wary of symmetry and perfection, and look instead for a reflection that extends something without reproducing it exactly, a colour that reappears somewhere unexpected, or a material that changes how a volume is perceived.

In the 60 m² Pigalle home, a striped tiled kitchen island and red lacquered cabinets give a compact kitchen its rhythm. In the living room, rust velvet sofas, a green lacquered table and a green floor lamp stand against pink curtains, so colour carries from one room to the next. In Saint-Cloud, a bed rests on a red lacquered platform beneath a mirrored ceiling, and the reflection repeats the red from a new angle.

Every Project Starts With a Story

An Atelier HA project begins with a feeling rather than a plan. Before any drawing, the founders work out what story the space should tell. The trigger might be an image, a film, a material, an era or a pairing of colours.

That idea becomes a vocabulary of materials, colours, forms, lighting and furniture, which is then tested against the site. “Then begins a constant back-and-forth between that initial intention and the very practical constraints of the space,” they say. “What interests us is making sure the original idea can still be felt once the project is built, without the space ever feeling as though it has been designed around an overly rigid concept.”

How Atelier HA Uses Vintage Furniture

For Atelier HA, vintage brings a different sense of time into a room, through patina or proportions that are rarely made today. “It also helps disrupt something that might otherwise feel too new or too perfect,” the founders say. Mixing periods has always been their default: “We have always enjoyed mixing different periods rather than creating interiors entirely around contemporary pieces or a single era.” For anyone wondering how to mix vintage and modern furniture, their answer is to stop treating the two as opposites. The friction between them is what makes the room interesting.

When judging a piece, shape and proportion come first, then material, build quality, patina and condition. The deciding test is whether it can hold its own without dominating, which matters more to them than whether it is a famous design. They also judge it in place rather than alone: scale, height, material, colour and how people will move around it.

From their Curiouz selection, the founders are most attached to a cabinet attributed to Fantoni, partly because it does not need a wall. “It is a piece that can live in the middle of a space,” they say. “That is also what we love about this kind of selection: discovering a piece we did not know before and which immediately makes us want to imagine an entire interior around it.”

Why Designers Return to the 1960s and 1970s

For Atelier HA, the appeal is freedom. “We love the freedom of that period,” the founders say, singling out “the sometimes strange proximity between sophistication and popular culture.” They are also drawn to the Space Age.

What they take from it is permission rather than a look: a period “when designers allowed themselves to create freer, more generous and sometimes almost excessive forms.” They borrow its references and reshape them, rather than recreating a 1970s room. The Ciuingam sofa by De Pas, D’Urbino and Lomazzi, from their selection, is a case in point.

How to Source Vintage Furniture With Confidence

The founders name the core problem as uncertainty: a piece that looks perfect has to be checked quickly for size, condition, provenance, restoration needs, transport and availability. On a professional project the bar rises. As they put it, “you then have to turn that discovery into something reliable: staying within budget and schedule, sometimes finding several identical or similar pieces, and making sure everything arrives at exactly the right time.”

What would help most? “Extremely reliable information that is immediately accessible.” Before committing to a piece, confirm: