Mark Phillips

Mark Phillips

Car interior designer / sculptor / boy racer

Text by Josh Sims

Portrait by Neil Gavin

Mark Phillips puts down his kitchen knife and admires the door handle he has sculpted from clay. "There is this perception that any kind of car design is all about computers," says Jaguar's interior design manager, winner of Top Gear's best interior of 2009 award for his Jaguar XJ. "Even I thought that. I was always interested in the look of cars. I don't know much about what goes on under the bonnet. But it took a while before I discovered that cars are designed using felt-tips, crayons and clay. I thought it was all rather dour stuff with set-squares."

Indeed, the tools of his trade haven't changed much since he had his first automotive thrill. Yes, there had been the Matchbox toys. But it was when his uncle Michael took him for a night-time spin in his open-top MGB that Phillips' sensory imagination lit up like the inside of an opening glove compartment. "It was the exhilaration of the engine noise and all the lights," he says, a 42-year-old made 12 again, "and the bump of flying into the foot-well when my uncle broke too hard."

Phillips was also in the right place. He grew up in the West Midlands, the heart of Britain's then-strong car industry, and got a job straight out of school as a studio apprentice with Rover. Four years later he moved to Jaguar, who sent him to the University of Coventry for its transport design course - then the only training of its kind in the UK, and now the alma mater of many of the world's leading car designers.

Since then Phillips has sketched many a conceptual theme for the interior of a proposed new car - working up mood boards, detailing and modelling the one chosen for closer work and then, in the case of the XJ, spending the next four years making it a reality. "The interior of a car is often what makes someone who likes the look of it from the outside make the leap of buying it," he says, citing the swirly saddle leather of Ghia Studio's 1992 Ford Focus Concept as his all-time favourite car interior. "Obviously there are budgetary and safety issues. But it's more about expressing the identity of the brand while providing a sense of feeling at home. After all, we spend a hell of a lot of time in our cars now - and drivers are much more design-savvy than they were just a decade ago."

Other departments at Jaguar are more obviously concerned with the technical nitty-gritty, but Phillips too may find his future work shaped by the gadgetry with which cars will increasingly come loaded. These already include in-car USB links to memory seats and also one of Phillips' own innovations for Jaguar: the first dual-view screen, meaning your front-seat passenger can be watching Le Mans while the driver watches the road. And bugs the passenger about what's happening in the race.

But Phillips, with his focus on feel and mood, is more likely to be up on trends in fashion, leather goods, shoes and yachts than anything to do with pistons and axle-grease. Details in the XJ, for example, were inspired by the wraparound veneer of a Riva motorboat, and the use of traditional if unexpected materials on a sneaker - in this case Harris tweed on a Nike pump. "Where a fashion designer works with fabrics, we work with chrome, woods and leather," he explains. "There is still an expectation that luxury cars will work with such 'natural' materials but now it's more about how you use them. It's all about the details, even if they are not that obvious at first. You can sit in some cars and feel that they have a personality. A lot of cars just don't."