Luxury design is no longer confined to cars or planes; you can find it in your phone and even your morning coffee, thanks to one American company

After watching your espresso trickle from a €2,000 Saeco twin mill automatic domestic coffee machine, programmed to mix the Blue Mountain with something Kenyan, you drink up and drive the BMW 7-Series to a nearby marina where the very latest mid range €3 million Zeydon yacht is waiting. Or maybe your destination is the airport where you may one day fly the next generation Boeing to a distant shore.

The common denominator on your morning journey is your engagement with products created by the BMW design team at Designworks USA.

If you are young and fashionable you may have come into contact with Designworks through your Villeroy and Bosch bathroom accessories. The older ones among us might know Designworks through the new line of Allergan cataract removal systems.

Who in the market for luxury goods knows aspirational consumers better? Would it be a designer of luxury cars or would it be the makers of luxury domestic coffee machines? Would it be the designer of business planes (Designworks created the exterior graphics and interior colour scheme for the Pilatus), upmarket exercise equipment or mobile phones?

Or would it be a car maker that designs all of these? Designworks US spends approximately 50 per cent of its time keeping BMW ahead of the design curve and the other 50 per cent on such external projects.

In the process, it is amassing not only an extensive understanding of what a generation of consumers really desire, but also subtly propagating its own design values across a wider and wider range of products, and testing its designers in ever more novel environments. This is win, win, win.

"What we are doing is to keep our projects on a wide range so we understand consumers' mindsets," says Laurenz Schaffer who heads Designworks US's Munich studio. "We're very active in technology-oriented projects, for example consumer electronics which are relevant to in-car entertainment. Sport and sailing is relevant to the BMW customer."

But back to Saeco. You will know them better through their commercial coffee-making machines, Gaggia. Saeco's domestic espresso machines, however, are market leaders. "We have around 38 per cent of the market of the domestic espresso machine," says marketing executive Andrea Cattani. "Our machines range from €400-€2,000 . . . but the lower part of the market is very competitive. So what we did with Designworks is created the new range."

And that includes the twin-mill automated espresso maker that is expected to set 7,000 consumers back by the full €2,000 over the course of 2007. So what is it that allows a team of car designers to design anything from cataract systems for hospitals to bathroom equipment?

The peripatetic designer is now a common place. Australian design guru Marc Newson has designed airplane interiors, a concept jet, concept car, sky bed for business class passengers, watches, bars, shops and hotels. Architect Zaha Hadid has just launched a new line in fine art sculpture. But their designs, outside their core competence, are driven primarily by aesthetics.

Increasingly the aesthetics of design have to be complemented by deep technical knowledge and market awareness.

"Companies also need a sustainable design," says Karen Moersch of luxury brand consultants Halsey Group. "It has to last for years to come. Look at the Rolex. Its design hasn't changed in decades."

This timelessness is what gives manufacturers access to the luxury segment of the market. What Designworks have pioneered is an ability to drive luxury markets on behalf of firms that may have no right of access to the high premium clientele they are eager to connect with.

Prior to the arrival of Designworks, design was not particularly structured at Saeco, Cattani acknowledges. Now Saeco feel they have coherence, technical innovation and a design language. "Designworks were very important in technical innovation and in making the characteristics of the machine more visible and easy to use."

What all that came down to was orientating the company around consumer desires, a field BMW knows well.

So, are the new machines the BMW of coffee? "Correct," answers Cattani. "With the shape of the front of the machine you can see the shape of the car."

Schaffer denies that his company simply transfers the BMW brand aesthetic. "The deeper goal is brand manifestation," he argues. But with Zeydon yachts, a start-up in the luxury yachts market, as well as Saeco espresso machines, Designworks have distributed some of the BMW appeal.

Zeydon's founders come from the coach building family VanHol who have been traditional BMW buyers.

Designworks' brief for the company was to reconceptualise the yacht, combining performance and comfort. "It is an aesthetic that emphasises expression, but not compromise. The interior emphasises luxury and a better organisation of space," says Schaffer. Not unlike Designworks' car design work.

The critical element of the Zeydon and Saeco projects though, surely, is that in each case a new business is being built out of design. For Zeydon, a start-up supplier of mid-range luxury yachts. For Seaco, a new market in ultra luxury domestic machines with which to launch and drive a coherent range of automatic espresso makers.

It is a feature of the new creative economy that products must be invested with new design values and creativity seems to be playing out on the border between mass and luxury products. "Mass market companies are trying to get a stake in the luxury market," says Moersch, who quotes the partnership between consumer goods' company Siemens and Porsche Design as another example of a mass market company seeking cache.

"The luxury market is a specific one," says Lieran Stubbings organiser of the Global Luxury Forum conference. "You don't just want to sell. If that's your aim, you won't last." Because of its particular characteristics and because it also represents the leading edge of the creative economy, luxury markets have significant appeal. However, both Stubbings and Moersch argue it requires special strengths to create goods that work in this segment. So what is the Designworks' approach?

"The way we are working?" muses Schaffer. "I guess an important element is that we have very individual personalities and developing alternative viewpoints is very important to us. The use of imagination and validation is part of our system - proper goal setting but leveraging creativity and alternative solutions, looking to fulfil goals in different ways, opening up wide discussions and heavy iterations between design and goal settings."

Schaffer also quotes learning as an important feature of Designworks culture, constantly learning what works as a design but also amassing greater experience in the requirements of well-healed clients. Anybody wanting a primer on the creative economy would do well to take note.

Working designs

ZEYDON YACHT

Zeydon is a start-up supplier of high quality semi-customised yachts in the €2-€3 million price range. The project was explicitly directed at the high-end consumers that are attracted by BMW's top of the range models. The brief for Designworks was to combine performance and styling with a more efficient use of the interior space.

PILATUS BUSINESS AIRCRAFT

Designworks used their knowledge of delivering customised products to help Pilatus take greater control of their brand identity, which was in danger of being diminished by the way users were choosing to customise the graphics and interiors. Designworks produced more limited but upmarket material composition charts that helped make colour and material selection easier, but which also gave Pilatus greater control over the brand.

STAR TRAC EXERCISE MACHINES

The market for gym-based and home exercise machines is growing, but is also highly competitive. Designworks helped Star Trac to redefine its brand around a more sophisticated aesthetic approach based primarily on creating inviting surfaces; improved usability; and better technical features.