Inside Designworks’ new Santa Monica studio

BMW’s Designworks is celebrating a historic move from its longtime home in Newbury Park, CA, to a smaller, all-digital space in Santa Monica. Founded in 1972 by Charles “Chuck” Pelly as an independent consultancy, Designworks was later acquired by BMW and was the birthplace of iconic designs for BMW as well as outside clients.

“When it started in 1972 there was this West Coast, hot-rod thinking,” Pelly told CDN in an exclusive interview ahead of Designworks’ official opening. “That was when all the imagination and future thinking was coming from California.”

Pelly’s original studio was in Malibu Canyon, close to the beach and the Pacific Coast Highway, where every weekend was a veritable parade of the world’s most coveted cars. Later, Pelly moved his studio to the Valley in Van Nuys. Clients over the years included Boeing, John Deere, Adidas and many others. In 1986, Designworks did its first project with BMW, designing the seats for the E31-generation 8 Series. Two years later, the firm relocated to a sprawling, 70,000 square-foot space in Newbury Park, about an hour’s drive outside the Los Angeles metro area (depending on traffic, of course).

Pelly remembers many anecdotes from those days, but a couple in particular stand out. “When I was really angry, I would get the biggest, widest broom and go sweeping through the design office,” he remembers. “Everyone hated it. I came banging through and they knew I was on the war path.” But it wasn’t all fire and brimstone. “I always felt very strongly about the importance of humor,” Pelly says. “Those were the days when designers had to leave stuff on their boards, and at night I’d walk around, and if I saw something wasn’t going well, I’d draw a really shitty drawing and sign my name and write a note like, ‘Bet you can’t do better.’ Usually I’d either get a note back or an even worse drawing in return.”

BMW acquired majority ownership of Designworks in 1991, and assumed full ownership four years later. The studio went on to make significant contributions to BMW’s lineup, including the Z8, 7 Series, 5 Series, and the exterior of the E46-generation 3 Series (a personal favourite of the author, whose daily driver is a Titanium Silver coupe with a manual transmission).

Most recently, Designworks created the graphics for the BMW LMDh race car which debuted at the 24 Hours of Daytona (led by Pelly’s daughter, Cheryl), and developed an app for the BMW i Vision Dee concept, shown this year at CES. During our studio visit, we also saw examples of sustainable materials created in partnership with local startups, part of BMW’s effort to achieve circularity by using its own production waste to create new materials, which can then be recycled and reused in an infinite loop.

A veritable who’s-who of designers have passed through Designwork’s doors over the years, including Henrik Fisker, who served as president from 1999 to 2002, as well as former Rolls Royce designer Marek Djordevic, Hyundai’s former California studio head Chris Chapman, and many more. Designworks’ current president since 2017, Holger Hampf, served previously as the head of user experience for BMW Group, a pedigree that underscores the increasing importance of UX/UI in automotive design and beyond.

“Designworks is the eyes and ears of BMW,” head of BMW Group Design Adrian van Hooydonk told us at the studio’s opening party this past week in conjunction with LA’s Frieze art festival. van Hooydonk himself led the studio from 2002 to 2004, before moving up the ladder and eventually succeeding Chris Bangle as head of BMW, Mini and Rolls Royce design. “We all know California is a place where people love cars and it’s a very competitive and interesting market.”

Culturally, the move to the heart of LA’s Westside is significant, as it extricates designers from the tract-housing-filled suburbs and into one of the most vibrant, affluent areas in Los Angeles County, close to a newly revitalised arts district and the many startups that have settled into the area, earning it the name of “Silicon Beach.”

Comprising only 16,500 square feet, the new Designworks in Santa Monica is almost entirely digital, leaving behind an arsenal of milling, painting and fabricating tools used at the studio’s former home in Newbury Park. “We had a giant five-axis mill in a room we called The Cathedral,” remembers BMW designer Erik Goplen, whose designs include the E46 exterior. “We had to open up the ceiling to make room for the tracking arm, so the roof looked like a steeple.”

This shift is on-trend with many design studios that have increasingly abandoned in-house clay modelling and other analogue methods in favour of a lean digital team, with the bulk of the manual work sent to outside contractors. “We work digitally because everything that comes after is very expensive,” van Hooydonk explained when we asked why Designworks would scale back its facilities so dramatically. “A smaller setup like this one is very helpful for us to interact with the real world and check whether what we are doing at headquarters is relevant.”

The Santa Monica studio also introduces a new hybrid work model, where employees work two days in the studio, two days from home, and can use the remaining weekday as a flex day. The heart of the new space is an open work area where designers can collaborate without the constraints of assigned seating, and can sit wherever they wish, after reserving their workstation via a customised app. Also on site is a visualisation room with a power wall, colour and trim area, conference room, some small private offices, lounge area, kitchen space, and a staging/work area for full sized models — where we did spot a few old-school tools like a table saw and a drill press.

Despite physical moves and changing technology, Pelly hopes the studio will always retain its fun-loving spirit. “The slogan at Designworks has always been: Great projects, great people, great fun,” Pelly says. “The shenanigans and the fun were the keys to our success.”