Coolnvintage has turned the Defender into a cultural project

Coolnvintage was founded in Lisbon in 2012 by Ricardo Pessoa, but more than a restoration atelier it has, from the beginning, been a cultural project. The Land Rover Defender is not the end goal but the vehicle: a radical industrial object, designed to last and adapt, chosen as a platform to construct a new language of contemporary manual work, balancing mechanics, design and real use. The original Defender was, by nature, free of rhetoric. Form subordinated to function, primary geometries, honest surfaces. A vehicle that does not ask to be “reinterpreted,” but understood. Coolnvintage starts here: with rigorous respect for the vehicle’s aesthetic, which is never overwritten but progressively clarified, made legible. The result is not a restomod in the traditional sense, but a critical reconstruction, where every formal decision is the direct consequence of a working system.

Pessoa, whom Domus met in person, rarely speaks about craftsmanship and almost never about nostalgia. His reference point is rather that of an industrial process: to reach certain quality standards, intuition is not enough. Structure, repeatability and control are required. Today about 90% of Coolnvintage’s work does not happen on the car itself, but beforehand: in research, sourcing, selection and above all the meticulous cataloguing of every single component. An approach that resembles a systemic design laboratory or a research center more than a traditional workshop.

About 40–50% of the base vehicles come from clients; the rest are selected directly by the team. Each Defender is completely dismantled; it takes six months just to reach a base ready for reassembly. Painting and structural treatments are entrusted to highly specialized external partners, because quality control also means recognizing the limits of self-production. The goal is not to redo everything, but to preserve as much as possible, intervening only where truly necessary.

The exclusive use of original Land Rover components is another fixed principle. Even new spare parts, when they do not meet required standards, are remade, corrected and re-coded. Many components available on today’s market come from global industrial production and fail to meet adequate tolerances, materials or finishes. At Coolnvintage every part enters a traceability system: it is recorded, updated and archived. Upon delivery, each car is accompanied by a book documenting the entire process, allowing — if desired — a return to its original state. A gesture that recalls the museum world, but here placed at the service of use.

Museum, however, is not the key word. In the beginning Coolnvintage worked exclusively with original factory colors, attracting mainly purist collectors: perfect cars, but destined for immobility. The turning point came when Pessoa decided to fully respect the structure and mechanics of yet another Defender while freeing the project chromatically and compositionally. Bolder combinations emerged, shifting the vehicle into a contemporary context without denying its identity. More conservative collectors stepped away, but new clients arrived: people who want to use these cars, live with them, take them to the sea on the slopes of Ibiza, to the snowy Alps, or across the rolling hills of their estate in Chianti. Real use tests the system. The first vehicles returned after a couple of years with signs of oxidation in certain areas. Coolnvintage intervened free of charge, corrected, improved the process and redefined its standards. A crucial passage: the error was not concealed, but absorbed into the method and transformed into operational knowledge. From that moment on, no compromise was allowed, not even after delivery. Today Coolnvintage counts around 20 team members, has produced about fifty vehicles and can deliver roughly a dozen per year. Each Defender is handed over as if it were founder Ricardo Pessoa’s personal car: no logo, no signature, no monogram. The brand’s identity is not declared, but embedded in the project.

This coherence runs through the entire Coolnvintage system. It is visible in the Lisbon atelier, in the ordered yet never spectacularized workspace, in the tools, in the sequence of operations. It is evident in the photographic materials, which seek precision rather than epic storytelling, and in the visual communication, where the object is always shown as the result of a process, not as a fetish. Even the Instagram page becomes an extension of the project: a visual archive of work, not a showcase. In an era that confuses personalization with excess, Coolnvintage proposes a different idea of uniqueness: one born from control of the process. An aesthetic of work before that of the product. And perhaps this, today, is the most advanced form of design.

All images: ©Coolnvintage