There is a particular kind of freedom in being handed paint and told, essentially, to make a mess. No technique to master. No blank canvas demanding something profound. No one peering over your shoulder. Just colour, movement and a slightly improbable collection of tools — boxing gloves, balls, ropes, scrapers — with which to throw, drag, splatter and smear paint wherever instinct takes you. It feels like play. It turns out that’s rather the point.
When Damien Schwander and Olivier Vouilloz created Colore Box in Lausanne in 2019, they weren’t really trying to open another painting studio. They wanted to create a place where people could let go.
The two met, fittingly, while painting. Olivier had studied business and psychology before eventually making art his profession; Damien had followed a rather different path through EHL and several years in a multinational before realising that the corporate world no longer aligned with his values. He turned towards abstract painting, and during a live painting event in Lausanne, their paths crossed.
Together, they began playing with an idea borrowed loosely from the phenomenon of Rage Rooms — spaces designed to let people release pent-up energy by smashing things. Damien and Olivier wondered whether that same sense of release could come from creating something instead of destroying it.
And so Colore Box was born.
The premise is deceptively simple: close the door, put away your inhibitions and paint. Each Colore Box is private, removing perhaps the biggest obstacle many of us have when confronted with anything vaguely artistic: the fear of being watched. Inside, there are no rules about what painting is supposed to look like. You can use your hands. You can fling paint with boxing gloves. You can send it flying from a rope or across the canvas with a ball. You can be four years old or eighty. Artistic credentials are not only unnecessary; they’re almost beside the point.
Because what Damien and Olivier are selling isn’t really a painting lesson. It’s permission. Permission to make something without needing it to be good. To be ridiculous. To get messy. To stop thinking for an hour about emails and deadlines and whether you’re doing something correctly.
When our own TLG team stepped inside a Colore Box, that was perhaps the biggest surprise. We expected it to be fun — and it absolutely was. But somewhere between the paint splatters, questionable techniques and collective laughter, it became oddly therapeutic too. There is something wonderfully disarming about watching the people you usually sit beside in meetings suddenly hurl paint at a canvas. It is, quite simply, a different way of spending time together. One that draws out a creative side we’re often very good at suppressing once childhood is behind us.
That idea of accessibility has been central to Colore Box from the beginning. Damien and Olivier wanted to create something that could work just as naturally for a family afternoon as a corporate team building, a school outing, a hen party or an experience for people living with disabilities. The objective remains the same: leave judgment outside and see what happens.
It wasn’t an obvious road to get there. They launched with the help of crowdfunding, then faced the rather spectacular timing of trying to establish a new experience-based business just before a global pandemic. But the concept survived. Then came the big companies — Nestlé, EHL, OMEGA, UBS and others — and the moment when its founders began to realise that their slightly unconventional idea had legs.
Today, there are eleven Colore Boxes across Switzerland, including Lausanne and Martigny, as well as franchises in Geneva, Bern and Zurich. The experience has evolved too, with different canvas formats and a fluorescent version painted under UV light. More ideas are already in the works.
But despite the growth, there is something appealingly human at the centre of it all. Ask Damien and Olivier what gives them the greatest satisfaction and they don’t talk about expansion or numbers. It’s knowing that the canvases created inside their boxes end up hanging in people’s homes and offices. The chaotic hour becomes something tangible: a piece of art carrying the memory of the people who made it.
One session even ended with a marriage proposal. Which, admittedly, raises the stakes considerably for the rest of us.
For Damien and Olivier, entrepreneurship has taught them that a concept can never simply stand still. You have to keep experimenting, adapting, finding new ways to surprise people. Perhaps it makes sense that the business they have built operates much like the paintings created inside it: start somewhere, try something, make a mess, adjust, add another layer.
And maybe that’s the real charm of Colore Box. You arrive thinking you’re going to paint a canvas. You leave remembering how good it feels to play.
Ch. Montolivet 19
1006 Lausanne
+41 77 809 01 14
