Range Rover Velar struts its stuff at Milan Design Week as Land Rover showcases the Velar’s elegance

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The new Range Rover Velar has arrived to be a design star at the Milan Design Week in La Permanente Museum, celebrating design innovation.

The new Range Rover Velar was revealed last month ahead of its big public debut at the Geneva Motor Show at a glitzy even at the Design Museum in Kensington. Which might just give you a clue or three about how Land Rover sees the Velar.

Clearly, the Velar is not just another Range Rover to fill a gap between the Evoque and Range Rover Sport (and an indication Land Rover is pushing the Range Rover range further upmarket), but a new statement of intent, particularly design intent.

Now, to emphasise the design bit, Land Rover has taken the new Velar off to the Milan Design week to be an exhibit at La Permanente Museum showcasing ‘Reductionism’, the idea of stripping away the superfluous to reveal the clean beauty beneath. Something many would say is overdue on Range Rovers.

Once, the Range Rover was a simple, classic beast, but recent models have seemed more and more adorned with frippery and glitz, hiding behind glitterball gaudiness to, it would seem, appeal to those whose bank accounts have grown exponentially despite their tastes being stuck in their mid-teens.

But the new Velar manages to look very appealing despite being simpler and cleaner in design than anything from Land Rover is the last 20 years and, we hope, signals a new direction.

As well as making Range Rover design so much cleaner than it had become, Land Rover have even eschewed (well, given the option of eschewing) that pre-requisite of a Land Rover interior, leather, in favour of new sustainable, rich wool yarn material from Kvadrat, designed to look as good and function better than leather.

Amy Frascella, Land Rover Colour and Materials Chief Designer, said:

Milan Design Week is the perfect opportunity to present the Velar, a car whose very name is Italian (Latin derived) from velare.

With the colour and material design of Velar in mind, our collaboration with Kvadrat couldn’t have been more appropriate – Kvadrat share Land Rover’s ethos and desire to continually innovate, to offer more curated customer choice and to define the future of luxury materials in our respective design industries.

Let’s hope the new Velar design ethos starts to roll out across the rest of the Range Rover range soon, and they become visually simpler, and in the process more elegant and therefore even more appealing.