The Dream List No. 30: Martin Mendoza

The Colombian architect reshaping interiors through restraint, ritual, and the radical beauty of understatement.

Some designers want you to notice the room. Martín Mendoza wants you to feel it.

The Colombian-born architect and interior designer works with a language of quiet — materials that whisper, forms that support, and spaces that invite you to slow down, soften, stay a little longer. His work doesn’t compete for attention. It simply exists, with presence and purpose, and an almost meditative clarity about what it’s there to do.

Martín doesn’t design for the camera or the algorithm. He designs for the rituals that make a life: the first cup of coffee, the afternoon light on a stone wall, the way a breeze passes through an open door. He’s not trying to make a statement — he’s trying to make something that lasts. That ethos runs through everything he does, from his material choices (wood, stone, steel, leather — all beautifully imperfect) to his process, which begins not with a vision board, but with a deep and patient kind of listening.

Courtesy of Mónica Barreneche

“I believe in observing before speaking,” he says. “In paying close attention to what a space — and a life — actually needs.” That’s not just a design philosophy. It’s a worldview. And one that, in a culture addicted to novelty, feels quietly radical.

Below, Martín opens up about the pieces, places, and personal objects that shape his work — and the cities that continue to inspire his way of seeing.