Alfa Romeo's call to CMF: 'Bring back warmth'
Over-digitilisation, dull colour schemes and a reliance on screens have created huge challenges for CMF design. Alfa Romeo's Pascal Dadamo has some thoughts
In November 2025, Alfa Romeo announced the creation of ‘Bottegafuoriserie’ – a new collaborative project with its sibling luxury sports car company Maserati. The idea was to establish a creative hub in Italy’s Milan province, linking existing facilities and bringing together design and engineering teams while also improving the efficiency of the manufacturing supply chain. The focus of the project is on highly personalised and limited edition runs.
One year on, Car Design News sits down with Pascal Dadamo, senior CMF designer at Alfa Romeo, to see how things are playing out.
Car Design News: What is the philosophy and approach when it comes to CMF work at Bottegafuoriserie?
Pascal Dadamo: CMF is where design actually starts, not something you just slap on at the end. The material itself really dictates the shape: the crispness and clean lines you get by milling a part from solid metal are impossible with plastic moulding, simply because you don't have constraints like draft angles or parting lines. The same goes for interiors: designing a smooth, seamless wrapped piece forces you into completely different forms compared to traditional upholstered parts with stitch cuts. The material drives the geometry. Colours and finishes then complete the picture: the colour brings out the volumes, while finishes and textures guide how you interact with a component, intuitively showing you where to touch and making it feel genuinely pleasant to the hand.
CDN: What is the greatest challenge currently facing CMF designers?
PD: The biggest trend right now is definitely the push toward heavy digitisation and massive screens. Interiors can easily end up looking like cold electronic showrooms, dominated by black glass and glossy touch surfaces covered in fingerprints.
For a CMF designer, especially at a driver-focused brand like Alfa Romeo, the challenge has actually become the exact opposite: bringing back warmth, tactility, and real physical feedback. The more digital and intangible cars become, the more drivers crave honest, tactile surfaces they actually want to touch. We have to counterbalance the presence of screens by introducing matte or satin finishes that cut out glare, warmer textures, and materials with real depth.
CDN: Does this require a different approach to working?
PD: It forces us to collaborate much closer with the UI and UX teams so that whatever is displayed on screen doesn't clash with the interior trims. When it comes to colours, I'm also seeing people get tired of flat, generic greys. There’s a noticeable return to rich, deep pigments that bring sculpted bodywork to life under direct sunlight, and inside, an appetite for more expressive, characterful colour palettes over the usual sterile cockpit.
CDN: What are your thoughts on the use of surfaces and the relationship between materials and functional components? Is there a way to offer beautiful, clean surfaces without cluttering them with buttons and switches while also ensuring driver functionality?
PD: There is a clear divide between series production and bespoke Fuoriserie because they answer to two very different cabin experiences. On production cars, the market today clearly pushes for significant digitisation, especially given the influx of tech-heavy Chinese competitors. We work to meet that demand for modern connectivity, but without ever forgetting what driving an Alfa Romeo is actually about.
Clean surfaces doesn't mean burying every single function inside a touchscreen
For us, clean surfaces doesn't mean burying every single function inside a touchscreen, rather designing an interior where key driving controls remain tactile, intuitive and placed exactly where your hand naturally reaches. This is where CMF plays an active functional role: by using contrasting textures, knurling, or distinct material finishes on buttons and toggles, the driver can identify controls entirely by touch, without taking their eyes off the road.
On Fuoriserie projects, true luxury is practically the reverse: it’s about subtraction. The choice there is to have as few screens as possible, strip away visual noise, and restore absolute focus on the act of driving. The clean lines of the cockpit aren't an excuse to be tech-minimalist. They let honest, raw materials, like milled aluminium, exposed carbon, and full-grain leather, take centre stage, paired with mechanical controls that deliver real physical weight, precise tactile clicks, and an almost sculptural presence.
CDN: How do you manage a balance between affordability, quality and sustainability? Is there always a trade off, or are you looking for solutions to improve in all areas?
PD: It really depends on the type of project, because series production and bespoke coachbuilding are two completely different worlds. On series production, we always aim for maximum quality right from the earliest concept phases.
We work very closely with our suppliers to find clever ways to meet strict cost targets. Sometimes we find great solutions that actually deliver perceived quality well above the car's price point; other times it takes a lot more work, fine-tuning every single detail to keep perceived quality high under tight budget constraints. But that’s actually one of the most rewarding parts of the job: using research and smart design to improve that cost-to-quality ratio rather than just settling for a compromise.
With Fuoriserie coachbuilding projects, on the other hand, the equation completely flips and we have far more freedom. The clients are demanding and know exactly what they want. In many cases, it’s the clients themselves during configuration sessions who push us to take things further, happily covering the production costs to get a specific bespoke material, rare finishes, or unique processes onto their car.
CDN: Alfa Romeo has a long and rich history of delivering beautiful, emotional vehicles to market. How are you drawing on that legacy for new models?
PD: Whenever we work on a new Alfa Romeo, looking at our history is simply unavoidable. It impacts every single detail, from upholstery materials to interior and exterior colours. But that doesn't mean playing it safe or being stuck in the past; quite the opposite.
For us, evolution has to start from our heritage. It’s about having respect for where we come from and using that foundation to build a new identity for the brand without losing our roots. What has always defined Alfa Romeo CMF is finding the right balance between elegance, practicality, and sportiness. We never go for gratuitous luxury or loud, aggressive styling just for the sake of it. A colour, a leather, or a textile has to look refined, hold up to real-world use, and immediately convey that authentic sporting character the moment you open the door.
