Gloating is never a good emotion, but when you discover one of the world’s greatest car stylists uses a classic Porsche as his daily driver, a feeling of warm smugness is forgivable, especially considering the man in question is noted for some of the best offerings from Jaguar and Aston Martin in modern times. I’m visiting Ian Callum at his Warwick-based design centre, Callum. Centre stage in the workshop-cum-studio of the firm’s industrial estate headquarters is a pair of reimagined Aston Martin Vanquishes, among the most recent models to flow from Ian’s prolific drawing board.
He hails from Dumfries. Fifty-four years ago, at the age of thirteen (you do the maths), he submitted a rendering for a car design to Bill Haynes, Chief Engineer at Jaguar. In 1979, after graduating with a degree in Industrial Design, he started work at Ford, going on to contribute to the RS200 and Escort Cosworth projects. In 1990, he joined design consultant, Peter Stevens, alongside Tom Walkinshaw at TWR Design, with standout projects including development of the Aston Martin DB7 and Nissan R390 GT1. From 1999, Ian was design director at Jaguar and Aston Martin, responsible for the DB9 and V8 Vantage, the F-type and XE (among others), and earning the CBE in 2019, the year he set up his eponymous design agency. In his gentle Scottish brogue, he tells me about his car life, his influences and some of his favourite projects.
His personal stable, so I discover, stretches to twelve vehicles, although he is notably vague when it comes to
