After a twelve-year career with JLR, Design Director Massimo Frascella has left his position with the company, heading to a new opportunity. His design legacy at Land Rover leaves an imprint on the entire current family of products.
After a twelve-year career with JLR, Design Director Massimo Frascella has left his position with the company, heading to a new opportunity. His design legacy at Land Rover leaves an imprint on the entire current family of products.
Frascella came to JLR in 2011, moving from Kia’s design studios in Irvine, California. The decision to move from sunny and beautiful Southern California to the moody British climate wasn’t an easy decision for the Italian Frascella, but the opportunity was more than worth it.
His first project was designing the new Discovery vehicles: the Freelander-replacement Discovery Sport, and the 2014 Discovery Vision Concept that morphed easily into the Discovery 5. From there, he moved to the massive project of redesigning the Defender – one of the biggest design challenges Land Rover will ever face. The generally positive reception to this massively emotional design challenge would suggest it was a successful project.
He was also influential in the redesign of the Range Rover brand. While the game-changing Evoque launched before he arrived at JLR, he was on the team that designed Range Rover Velar, which set the tone for the second generation of modern Range Rovers. The "avante garde Range Rover," as Velar was dubbed on launch, set the tone with epic design features that have only just finished trickling down into the latest Range Rover and Range Rover Sport.
Frascella spent his entire career at JLR working under Gerry McGovern, who famously (or to some, infamously) led Land Rover's massive vibe shift in the 2000s away from pure off-road and towards a focus on desirability. Frascella started as Creative Studio Chief in 2011, moving to Creative Director, Exterior Design in 2014. In 2019 he became Land Rover Creative Director, in 2020 Land Rover Design Director, and in 2021 Design Director for all of JLR.
Frascella was in a way on his second round through Land Rover, as he had spent time touching the brand when he worked with Ford early in his career, as Senior Designer during their ownership of Land Rover in the 2000s. His time at Kia as Design Manager helped turn that brand around, bringing them into their current era of design-forward vehicles. (For every new Defender detractor who says that it looks like a Kia Soul, there's the interesting fact that the same person designed both vehicles.)
His wife, Amy Frascella, who came to JLR from Hyundai/Kia and has worked alongside him for years, is also reported to be leaving the company. She has spent her career with the company focused on materials, ending as Materiality Director, and it's under her eye that Land Rover has made huge strides in incorporating advanced, durable, sustainable materials throughout the line. She's led the way in introducing modern plant-based vegan materials as optional finishes in Land Rover vehicles. While many automakers are now getting on this bandwagon, in 2017 the Velar launched with the textile option of Kvadrat, a wool-polyester blend, a big deal when leather was still king. She also spearheaded the addition of fully vegan textile options into the Range Rover line.
There's no hint of what's next, either for the Frascellas or Land Rover's design department. But his work will always be a key part of Land Rover's story, as the design leader in one of the most pivotal eras in the company's history. The risks taken over the past decade, all made heavily with Frascella's input, have paid off -- turning Land Rover into a powerhouse of desirable, high-design vehicles that still hold the core ability to get the job done off-road.
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