A Weekend Inside the Calty Design Lab with Lexus

I didn’t expect my automotive design education to start with a perfume bottle. But there I was in a hotel in West Hollywood carefully measuring drops of vanilla and blood orange, trying to capture something about my own identity in fragrance form. 

This wasn’t some wellness retreat gone sideways—it was day one of understanding how Lexus thinks about design.

Lexus, through its design studio Calty (short for “California Toyota”), believes that real innovation doesn’t come from staying inside the automotive industry. It comes from stepping into galleries, greenhouses, and rooms scented with memory. These designers don’t just sit at computers all day, but are out in the world studying everything from architecture to nature to find inspiration. They even have a Japanese phrase they love: “genchi genbutsu,” which means “go to the source and see for yourself.”

That’s why our journey didn’t begin with a car, but with understanding how design moves people on a deeper level.

Our itinerary with the Calty team read more like an art retreat than a car company visit: blend your own perfume, explore an LA estate filled with collectible furniture, tour the design studio that shaped Lexus’ visual identity. Eventually, yes—imagine and build the car interior of the future. But first we had to learn to see and feel the world the way Lexus does.

Our first lesson in design began with a scent workshop hosted by Capsule Parfumerie, a Los Angeles-based olfactory studio. The owner Linda Sivrican guided us through crafting a signature fragrance using a palette of ingredients that reflected the Lexus/Toyota combo of Japanese minimalism and Californian warmth.

Seated at long tables set with vials of oils and test strips, we were encouraged to blend, sniff, and journal our way through a selection of 14 different scents. Linda emphasized that scent is subjective, more of a heart-led art than a science. “Smell with your eyes closed,” she said. “Use your intuition. Everyone’s combination will be different, and that’s exactly the point.”

We learned to build a fragrance from top, middle, and base notes, testing combinations like pink peppercorn with black tea. Some of us gravitated toward light and citrusy while others dove headfirst into musky, mysterious blends. 

Our next stop was The Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House. Founded by David Alhadeff in his Williamsburg apartment over 20 years ago, The Future Perfect started as a personal experiment in curation. 

The home hosts exhibitions that rotate every few months, transforming the domestic setting into a living showcase. Works by designers and emerging makers ranging from storied production furniture brands to single artisans crafting one-of-a-kind pieces are woven into the home’s layout. It felt less like a gallery and more like stepping into the life of someone with impeccable taste. 

The Calty team mentioned that designers often visit places like the Future Perfect House to spark new ideas through unexpected forms and materials. As we walked through, it was easy to see how a space like this could influence concept work. Every room had its own rhythm. Sculptural lighting fixtures hovered like celestial bodies. Ceramic vessels sat alongside plush, architectural chairs that invited touch.

Afterward we set off for our visit to the Calty Design Research Center. The Calty lab isn’t what you’d expect from a studio shaping the future of Lexus. To me, it felt more like an art school crossed with a creative lab.

Inside the lab the team began telling us the most interesting stories behind some of their famous designs. Before Photoshop existed, for example, one designer filled a car-shaped mold with plaster, hand-sculpted it, painted it, then projected the image onto a wall to trace new forms. 

They also tell us about how they’ve pulled inspiration from unexpected places—the curves of the LC500 concept came from studying a snake plant’s leaves. They vacuum-sealed the leaves, scanned them, then transformed its organic curves into luxury car lines.

What surprised me most was how experimental the team is. Calty is constantly competing with Toyota design studios around the world, not just for cars that will actually get made, but for wild concepts that might never see the road. Though many do make it—the lab is most recognized for its Toyota FT-1 concept that debuted in 2014 (its original concept sits in the lobby of the design house), eventually inspiring the Toyota Supra’s design.

The team also spoke in-depth about how they approach CMF in the lab. Each designer focuses on how materials interact with light, how a fabric can shift depending on your angle, and how certain surfaces change based on time of day or mood. Some of their CMF palettes are also inspired by specific feelings, like walking through a misty forest or watching city lights at dusk. 

Calty’s creative designer Sarah Song demonstrated paint materials that seemed to shapeshift right in front of us. Paint, we learned, is one of the most challenging and rewarding areas of automotive design. It starts with inspiration and concepting—trend research, art and architecture exploration, even fieldwork like our Future Perfect visit. Then comes 3D visualization, using digital models to test how different pigments, shadows, and highlights behave in virtual light. 

Sarah showed us paint swatches inspired by everything from solar eclipses to astronaut visors. One Lexus paint featured a warm black base with laser-like orange highlights and subtle gold undertones, meant to evoke the beauty of cosmic events. She says that color went through dozens of iterations with different levels of warmth, reflection, and contrast tested on painted wood samples.

Finally we entered one of Calty’s concept vehicles. Inside the car, lights pulsed softly from the dashboard and flowed through the side panels. Seats made from bamboo bio-materials felt surprisingly plush. Copper threading ran through the console. 

The car seemed to transform around us. As we sat, the interior shifted from cooling green—as if leaves were rushing past—to blue and white designed to sharpen focus. Future models, they told us, might even incorporate personalized scents.

Then came our turn to create. Each of us were individually challenged to design our own car interiors and exteriors using Calty’s material library. Chief designer Sellene Lee walked us through the thought process behind it all. She encouraged our group to approach our designs as a “space,” instead of just a car. We also thought about more tactile experiences, like how a car door should feel cool in the morning sun, or how light might travel across a dashboard like a ripple across water.

Afterward we were off to put together colorful swatches, experimental textile panels, and spools of copper thread next to fragments of sculpted bamboo composites. Throughout the process the Calty designers offered insights that went beyond aesthetics: “How would this texture feel against your skin while driving? What quality of light do you want your materials to catch?”

I based my curation on the “strong forms in nature” and “peaceful serenity,” opting for nature-inspired hues like soft blues, greens, and wood tones. A wavy 3D printed slab that shifted between green and blue depending on the angle was the focal point of my design, which felt a little wild but still fitting. Darker metals paired with a lighter leather seat seemed to work well on my design tray. Here’s what it looked like: 

After collecting materials and debriefing them as a group, we were told that Calty would use our selected materials to put together a memento of our time at the lab. A few weeks after we left, it arrived: 

In a world that’s always rushing, this experience with Calty reminded me that good design makes us slow down and pay attention. It invites us to notice how light hits a wall, to feel the weight of materials in our hands, and to trust our gut when something feels right even if we can’t explain why.

@caltydesignresearch