Teklan x Slalom: A New Color Palette for Acoustic Design
TEKLAN x SLALOM
Slalom has introduced a new color palette in collaboration with Teklan, a Swedish designer, colorist, and art director known for her expressive, intuitive approach to color.
The collection adds a fresh layer of softness and sophistication to Slalom’s acoustic materials, expanding how designers think about sound control, surface design, and spatial atmosphere.
A SOFTER, MORE ARCHITECTURAL PALETTE
Teklan’s work with Slalom goes beyond selecting new colors. The collaboration includes a new CMF development of 27 colors across four material qualities, expanding Slalom’s already expressive palette with softer, more grounded, tone-on-tone options. The result gives designers more nuanced ways to coordinate acoustic materials with surrounding finishes, furnishings, and architecture, while still allowing color to play an active role in the space.
“What interested me from the outset was the opportunity to work with acoustic materials not as isolated products, but as an architectural language.”
COLOR AS AN ARCHITECTURAL TOOL
In interiors, color is never just decorative. It changes how we read a room. It affects light, proportion, mood, and movement. With the Teklan x Slalom palette, color becomes part of the architectural language of the space.
The new shades were developed to feel soft without disappearing, present without becoming loud. They are mineral, nuanced, and quietly expressive, with the kind of complexity often found in carefully selected wall colors.
For Slalom, that matters. These are not simply colorful acoustic panels. They are acoustic surfaces that help shape the feeling of a room.
“We filled a gap, starting from a technical material and transforming it into a tactile and engaging element.”
ACOUSTIC MATERIALS WITH A SOFTER POINT OF VIEW
Slalom has always worked at the intersection of acoustic performance and design expression. Their materials help absorb sound, soften interiors, and create more comfortable environments for work, hospitality, education, culture, and gathering.
The Teklan palette builds on that foundation. It gives designers more ways to use acoustic materials from the earliest stages of a project, not as an afterthought, but as part of the complete interior concept.
Soft color, dimensional texture, and acoustic performance begin to work together. The result is a more integrated approach to designing spaces that feel good, sound better, and support the people using them.
“Starting from a strength — each Slalom acoustic solution is available in a wide variety of colors and shapes — our research has focused on a new, fresh energy.”
ACOUSTICS, ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
The collaboration also reflects Slalom’s broader philosophy of Acoustethics, a concept that brings together acoustics, ethics, and aesthetics. For Slalom, acoustic performance is only one part of the equation. Materials are also considered through the lenses of sustainability, well-being, responsible production, and design. The goal is to create products that improve how a space sounds while also contributing to how it looks, feels, and functions. Teklan’s new palette fits naturally within that thinking, using color and materiality to make acoustic performance feel fully integrated into the architecture rather than added on afterward.
“We invented a term to describe ourselves: acousthetics, a mix of aesthetics, ethics and acoustics.”
SOFT CUBISM: COLOR AS PART OF THE ARCHITECTURE
For Salone del Mobile 2026, Teklan developed Soft Cubism, a layered installation exploring the space between acoustics, architecture, perception, and atmosphere. Rather than presenting Slalom as a collection of individual products, the installation used rhythm, overlapping planes, depth, texture, and color to show how acoustic materials can become part of a complete architectural language. The result balanced strict geometry with softness and tactility, demonstrating how acoustic performance can shape not only how a space sounds, but how it is perceived and experienced.
“I don’t see color as separate from functionality.”
FROM MILAN TO CHICAGO
The collaboration continued at Casa Slalom Chicago, Slalom’s new permanent showroom at The Mart, announced at NeoCon 2026. Gensler Houston designed the architecture, while Teklan developed the interiors, bringing her approach to color into direct conversation with Slalom’s acoustic materials.
The result is a space where color, surfaces, light, and sound work together as part of one design language. Rather than treating acoustic performance as a separate layer, the showroom integrates it into the overall architectural experience, demonstrating how Slalom’s materials can contribute to both the atmosphere and function of a space.
For designers in the U.S., Casa Slalom offers a closer look at how this thinking translates from concept to built environment: acoustic materials that do more than absorb sound, helping shape visual identity, spatial rhythm, comfort, and mood.
"The Slalom showroom is a joyful expression of light, color, and sound. You walk in and feel it. That sense of well-being is exactly what Slalom's work is about. Seeing it fully realized in a permanent space is exciting for everyone who specifies these products."
A NEW LANGUAGE FOR ACOUSTIC INTERIORS
The Teklan x Slalom palette reflects a larger shift in interior design toward spaces that feel warmer, softer, more human, and more emotionally considered.
It also expresses Slalom’s Acoustethics philosophy: the idea that acoustics, ethics, and aesthetics should work together from the beginning of the design process. Performance does not have to be separated from color, materiality, sustainability, or visual expression.
With Teklan’s new palette, acoustic materials become part of the architecture itself, helping define mood, create depth, support visual identity, and improve the experience of a space at the same time.
