The rise of the floating roof

Following the example set by the modern Mini, optional contrast-coloured roofs have become big business for car makers. A splash of contrasting paint can bump up the profit margins of models large and small, while customers have embraced the opportunity to personalise their purchases.

The trend has drawn in marques at every price point, from Ssangyong to Aston Martin. It has also fuelled a surge in ‘floating’ roofs, which provide a clean separation between the two sections of differing colour. Depending on budget, pillars are de-emphasised using overlapping glass, black polycarbonate trim pieces, simple black paint, or dark film wraps; yielding the illusion of a roof supported only by glass. Semi-floating roofs, which retain a minority of body-coloured pillars (such as the Nissan GT-R), have similarly become much more common.

2004 Land Rover Range Stormer concept

Three OEMs currently stand out as flag bearers for floating and semi-floating designs: Mini, Land Rover and Citroën. Each has established the separation of roof and body as a key element of its design vocabulary – and intriguingly, each has a strong history and pedigree with this feature that runs deeper than today’s fashion trends.

Three of the most iconic designs of all time – the first Range Rover, the Issigonis Mini and the original Citroën DS19 – each included ancestors of today’s floating roofs.

The Mini, launched in single-tone colours in 1959, gained a contrasting roof in 1961, with the arrival of the sporty Austin Cooper. The construction of the monocoque provided a natural divide, where the oblong roof was spot-welded onto the bodysides. The Mini’s infamous external seams created a continuous ring of gutter.

In January 1964, a Mini Cooper S driven by Paddy Hopkirk won the gruelling Monte Carlo Rally. Clad in the works livery of red with a white roof, it cemented the image of the Mini as a two-colour car. The team had previously run red sports cars with white hardtops, so the colour scheme was a natural choice.

With its body-coloured pillars, the early Mini Cooper didn’t possess a proper floating roof. That jump wasn’t made until 1997 and Adrian van Hooydonk’s ACV30 concept.

Created during that difficult period when BMW owned Rover, the ACV30 embodied the BMW vision for Mini’s future. The Rover view, shown the same year as a pair of Mini Spiritual concepts, took a very different approach with gracefully arched rooflines swooping from scuttle to boot.

Duotone paint and a floating roof must have felt distinctly old-hat to the Rover design team, given both were staples of the firm’s output a decade earlier, applied to cars like the R8 Rover 200/400 series and angular Rover 800.

The ACV30 took its cues from Hopkirk’s victorious rally car, its red and white bodywork popping out against a dark ring of glazing. The direction it took was crystallised by Frank Stephenson’s R50 Mini hatchback, revealed three years later.

Almost every Mini design since has featured a fully floating roof (the exception, convertibles aside, being the 2007 Clubman with its coloured rear gateposts). The roof is now a hallmark of the brand, even if it has led to some questionable outcomes.

The current Mini 5-Door, for example, features a forest of poorly concealed pillars that creates a somewhat cluttered look – the opposite of the wraparound aspiration.

Citroën’s successful bid to emulate the Mini with its DS3, previewed at the 2009 Geneva show as the DS Inside concept, likewise featured a contrast-coloured floating roof. With a shortened B-post, glazed C-pillar and blacked out A-post, DS3 designer Mark Lloyd delivered a clean visual separation and neat proportions.

DS and Citroën design languages have since diverged but it is Citroën that has kept most of the DS3’s vocabulary, including the floating roof. This is perhaps surprising, given that the original DS featured a primeval floating roof.

As with Issigonis’s Mini, Flaminio Bertoni’s magnum opus arrived with a natural break in its construction, with a fibreglass roof panel (later aluminium) bolted onto the body frame as a separate unit. While the DS’s lower panels were painted a variety of contemporary shades, the roof was initially limited to black, turquoise, ivory or aubergine. With chromed window frames and an alloy overlay on the C-pillar, the DS was sliced neatly in three: roof, glasshouse and body.

Current Citroën design language also stems from the 2013 Cactus concept, which featured black front pillars and a break at the top of the C-pillar.

The subsequent C3, C3 Aircross and C5 Aircross carry forward many of the Cactus cues, although it’s interesting to note that the production C4 Cactus is not actually offered with a contrasting roof. Instead, roof rails are employed to give a coloured accent at the top of the car.

Like Rover, Citroën also produced cars with floating roofs towards the end of the 1980s, with 1989’s Bertone-designed XM sandwiched between the 1988 Activa and 1990 Activa 2 concepts. It was not a design theme that stuck, however.

Today, Citroën project design director Andy Cowell says a contrasting roof is a handy thing to have. “As soon as we start cutting the vehicle up into different colours we can make changes to the perception of the mass,” he says. “It also makes a very graphical feature of the waistline.”

These outcomes help to manage the influence of other trends, he explains. “Take into account how basic proportions and masses are evolving: wheel sizes are getting bigger; body sizes are getting bigger; window graphics, which were perceived as being black, are getting smaller and narrower, and the vehicles are still relatively tall. So a floating roof is one of the tricks of the trade to try and manage the mass and proportions of those vehicles.”

Range Rover is a brand with more mass and height to manage than most other marques, and its signature floating roof clearly helps to deliver pleasing proportions.

Original Land Rovers’ angular roof sits atop it like a farmer’s flatcap

Early series Land Rovers often featured contrasting roofs, adding an attractive quirk to the boxy utilitarian design. A natural divide arose where the aluminium hard top bolted onto the body frame.

By contrast, 1970’s more sophisticated Range Rover arrived all in one colour, with simple painted pillars. But again there was a natural split, with the corrugated alloy roof bolted on as a separate piece. Vinyl covering was added to the rear pillar in 1973 as a cheat – masking the frequent production flaws that blighted this component. The thin remaining pillars were later painted black to match, creating the Range Rover’s familiar floating look.

…which cannot be said of the classless original Range Rover

By the time the P38A Range Rover arrived in 1995, after 25 years of the initial design, the black pillars had become a core design feature. They’ve carried right through to the 2017 Range Rover Velar without interruption.

Many Range Rovers now feature a black roof, blending in with the glasshouse to create the impression of a bubble atop the bodywork. This colour scheme was applied to the Velar for its launch livery and has the effect of pushing the apparent mass downwards – a handy effect on a large and bulky car.

As SUVs become ever more ubiquitous, perhaps it’s the black bubble glasshouse that is poised to supplant the contrast-coloured ‘floating’ roof as the rising trend of the future.