IT’S YOUR CLOSEST CONNECTION with your car, yet once you’ve ticked the colour choice box on your order sheet, you barely think about it. Interior. Upholstery. Trim. It may be luxurious leather or practical fabric but (until someone spills Ribena on it) you barely give it a thought.
Unless you are restoring a classic car, when you suddenly discover how many choices your trimmer wants to know about. And that’s when simply copying what someone at Lagonda or Austin, Bertone or coachbuilder James Young installed many years before. There is much skill in stitching those seams to a period pattern and ensuring the material is beautifully taut and the stitching rulerstraight. Traditional skill, but not inventive. But if you’ve radically altered your latest machine in restomod fashion you don’t really want standard upholstery.
Step forward Dean McConnell of Trimworks. You want a vibrant interior colour scheme? Completely reshaped seats? Alcantara everywhere? Dean can rustle up a dozen ideas for something fresh that no-one else can boast. He’s perfectly capable of assiduously copying a worn-out interior for a much-loved classic, but it’s the chance to get creative that gets his sketching fingers twitching.