Three experts reveal why the principles behind a Bentley can be just as relevant to a beautifully designed home.
Luxury car brands have long since expanded beyond the garage and into the home. Bentley furnishes living rooms, Aston Martin has designed skyscrapers, Porsche hangs its name above branded residences, and you might browse Rolls-Royce for objects and home collections as often as you peruse its vehicles.
But while automotive manufacturers have borrowed from the world of interiors, the dialogue rarely flows the other way. When asked about which brands inspire her work, however, architect Stephanie Fillbrandt doesn’t reference another architect or designer. She talks about Alfa Romeo.
«It’s beautiful; all curved lines, so simple. The bending of metal into a really beautiful shape. I want to run my hand over it. I want to touch it. I want to feel it», says the principal at Marsh & Clark Design.
Fillbrandt is inspired less by performance statistics or horsepower, of course, than by materiality, proportion, and the emotional response that a well-designed object can evoke – the same qualities she creates in her interiors.
And it’s tactile experiences that are the theme that ran through an event hosted by Elite Traveler x Patrimony Wines, titled An Evening of Elevated Design: Craft, Material, and Modern Luxury, in San Francisco, recently. From dashboards and timber veneers to metalworker Valentine Stachowski‘s appreciation for the satisfying thunk of a G-Wagon door closing – «it sounds like a bank vault» – the discussion focused on details that are felt as much as they are seen.
That emotional connection is something Martin Lauber knows well. As founder of San Francisco’s Club Wheelhouse, the members’ club and luxury car storage facility where the discussion took place, he has built a community around the visceral appeal of cars. «Everything kind of slides away when you’re on the right road with the right car,» he says. «The same is true about design, furniture, and spaces. They can literally change your posture and your emotion.»
For Robert Ross, Elite Traveler’s man on the ground moderating the conversation – and an esteemed automotive and design writer in his own right – those overlaps are hardly surprising. «When you take a bird’s-eye view of what modern luxury is, it’s the details of someone’s life,» he says. «The buildings we live in, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the wine we drink. They’re all luxury experiences created by passionate artisans and executed by great designers.»
One area where the automotive and interiors worlds have complete synchronicity is longevity. Both industries are tasked with creating objects people want to live with and, perhaps most importantly, use for decades.
Asked what excites her most in design today, Fillbrandt points not to a new aesthetic movement but to a growing appreciation for permanence and craftsmanship. Younger generations, she argues, seem increasingly interested in objects with history rather than disposability. Rather than stripping period homes back to blank canvases, she prefers to restore architectural details and create spaces that feel as though they belong to the building. «I try to reimagine how it can last another 100 years,» she says.
The same could be said for much of the work taking place inside a home. Alan Ramm of Bakehouse Kitchens speaks enthusiastically about mortise-and-tenon and dovetail joints – terms unlikely to excite anyone outside the cabinetry world, yet fundamental to how a piece performs decades later. Most homeowners will never see them, but that’s precisely the point. «You need to make sure that you’re leaving an heirloom,» he says.
Much of Ramm’s and Fillbrandt’s work is completed under non-disclosure agreements, such is the nature of their collective clientele, meaning some of their most technically complex and carefully considered projects can never be publicly shared. Instead, their success is measured by how the work functions and endures (and the word-of-mouth buzz that creates within select circles) rather than how often it appears on social. It’s not so different from the engineering hidden beneath the bonnet of a car, where the most important work is often the least visible.
See also: Interior Designer Shalini Misra’s Take on Private Jets
The connection isn’t purely philosophical, either. Ramm describes using automotive bonding adhesives on a recent project involving stainless steel-clad aluminium doors, borrowing technologies originally developed to cope with the stresses and temperature changes experienced by vehicles. «There’s a significant amount of technical data that’s been developed by the automotive industry that we use every day in the shop,» he says.
For Fillbrandt, the lesson extends beyond materials and manufacturing. Good design requires patience. «I think materiality [is paramount] – if something is going to endure it has to be made well,» she says. «Give yourself the gift, the grace, the luxury of time to develop it.»
Perhaps that’s why the relationship between automotive and interior design feels less like a trend and more like a conversation. As Ross puts it, luxury is a continuous fabric where every detail connects to the next. And while the car in the driveway and the room beyond the front door may serve different purposes, they’re increasingly asking the same question: what makes something worth keeping?
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