Luzzo Bespoke Limited

Alan Sawyer, the owner and chief designer of the specialty furniture company Luzzo Bespoke Limited in Britain, draws inspiration from a fitting source, considering his background in automotive design.

His Bugatti desk, limited to an edition of 10, borrows its French blue from the marque made famous by Ettore Bugatti, but takes most of its cues from his cars’ mechanical details, like the finned heat sinks of the oil sumps or the honeycomb of their grilles.

The desk is Luzzo Bespoke’s masterpiece, the glinting result of expensive milling machines, six coats of baked paint and a team numbering about two dozen. It also bears a price close to that of some of the vintage cars Mr. Sawyer admires: 170,000 euros, or about $243,000.

The bolts of the body, the louvers and worked metal of the dash, as well as the thick, three-millimeter leather work surface hark back to Bugattis of the 1920s and ’30s, Mr. Sawyer said. An Apple iMac is installed inside the desk, which the user raises with a hand crank connected to a rack and pinion system. The effect is bespoke steam punk.

Mr. Sawyer is a veteran supplier of specialty trim parts for the luxury car industry. Trained as a furniture designer, he has created option-box interior bits found in the catalogs of Rolls-Royce and Jaguar, as well as American luxury brands. His company builds cabinets, tables, writing boxes and even dining chairs employing the materials of high-zoot car interiors, notably wood veneer and thin aluminum.

In an e-mail, Mr. Sawyer recalled watching the Goodwood Festival of Speed vintage races, held each summer in the English countryside, and being struck with the notion of channeling the spirit of classic cars into an executive desk. He looked particularly at the Bugatti Type 35 of 1924 or the Type 59 of 1935, assembling many photographs before designing the details in a CAD/CAM system.

He has developed sketches for other desks in this vein and hopes they will express the distilled essence of the brands he loves.

“We have had a lot of requests for desks based on Ferrari, Porsche, the McLaren F1, the Alfa Romeo Monza, Aston Martin DBR1 and One-77, and Auto Union,” he said.

“We will only produce these desks to order, and therefore they remain concepts at the moment,” he said. “We have also been asked to design desks with less complexity than the Bugatti one to keep the cost down. There seems to be a big market for these desks at around the $75,000 mark.”