Italian Design Meets Automotive Excellence: A New Commission in Panama and Colombia

I have been appointed to design the interiors of exclusive car showrooms in Panama and Colombia: spaces that will present automobiles from marques including Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti and Porsche. It is a commission I receive with pride, and one that opens a new chapter of my work in Latin America, a region where I have worked for many years, from the Caribbean to Central America.

Where Italian design meets the automobile

Italy has a particular way of thinking about a project. Before style there is a culture: the proportion of a room, the honesty of a material, the way light enters a space and moves across its surfaces through the day. It is the same culture that shaped many of the cars these showrooms will present, and an architect trained in it recognises the kinship at once. A car body and a façade are both exercises in proportion, tension and detail.

Bringing that sensibility to an automotive space means designing the architecture around the car, never against it. The room recedes where the car needs silence and comes forward where the visitor needs orientation. Light is modelled, never flat. Materials are chosen for how they age and for how they speak to the objects on display: stone, metal, leather, wood and glass, each judged under the hand and under the light.

The showroom as a sequence

A showroom at this level is not a sales floor. It is a sequence of moments: the arrival, the first sight of the car, the approach, the conversation and, finally, the delivery of a vehicle that someone may have waited months for. Each moment asks for its own space, its own acoustics and its own light. My task is to compose that sequence so that the architecture accompanies the car and its owner without ever competing with either.

A new chapter in Latin America

This commission brings together two threads of my practice: the Italian design culture I was trained in, and the work I have built across Latin America with my studio and with PT Virtuard Reality Design, where real-time visualisation lets a client walk through a space long before it exists. These interiors will be developed the same way, explored and refined in an immersive environment before any decision reaches the site.

The project is at its beginning. In the coming months I will document its development here, from the first concept onwards. For now, I am grateful to the client for their trust, and for the opportunity to interpret Italian design in spaces where the automobile is the protagonist.