Rolls-Royce designer takes senior role at Pininfarina
Pininfarina has brought in Felix Kilbertus from Rolls-Royce to fill the position left vacant by previous chief creative officer Kevin Rice
Felix Kilbertus has been appointed chief creative officer at Pininfarina, returning to the company following a stint there between 2011 and 2014.
Primarily an exterior designer, Kilbertus came through the ranks with internships at Alfa Romeo, Honda and Renault, eventually landing a job at Nissan in Japan where he worked on the Esflow EV concept for the 2011 Geneva motor show. He would go on to spend nearly eight years at Renault in Paris. Most recently he has served as head of exterior design for Rolls-Royce in Munich, and chief exterior designer for FCA in Turin before that.
His new role at Pininfarina will see him serve as a “creative and strategic guide” at Group level, covering all aspects of design the company is involved in. These segments include mobility, product & experience design and architecture. He remains a Rolls-Royce staffer for now and will officially join his new team on 17 April 2023, taking the reins from Kevin Rice who left the company in December.
Kilbertus holds a masters degree in industrial design and another in automotive design, the latter obtained from Strate College of Design in France in 2003. Reporting on that year’s degree show at the time, CDN heard from Kilbertus how his ‘l’eautomobile’ concept, a personal submersible watercraft, would suit a future where ”people will live in marine cities that offer a higher quality of life.” He pointed to perennial Venice as currently ”the only existing ocean city […] on a journey towards future ocean cities and their socio-cultural particularities.”
In June last year, Pininfarina celebrated 50 years of its in-house wind tunnel, leading to various iconic designs. As the company moves forward, it is continuing to broaden its horizons into new fields of design, and Kilbertus will be tasked with helping teams across Italy, China and the US navigate rapidly evolving mobility, experience and architecture trends. As some of his early concept work at Strate college would suggest, he clearly has no trouble thinking outside of the box and has a handle on the intersection between automotive, architecture and product design.