range rover’s installation travels through time from 1970 to 2025

Range rover presents time-travel installation in Milan

During Milan Design Week 2025, Range Rover presents its first-ever installation with a scenography that travels through time from the 1970s to 2025. Set at the historic Piazza Belgioioso, visitors see a 25-meter monolith in the center of the square, adorned with a gold Range Rover motif, when they arrive. Behind it, there’s a gold cube housing the installation for Futurespective: Connected Worlds. A raised platform welcomes them. Once the doors open, the visitors wander into the first leg of the experience, the one that the California-based studio NUOVA staged. Here, the present time filters away, portaling the visitors to a Range Rover car dealership in the 1970s. It’s not an inspo choice for the brand to choose the specific year. It is their founding date, the year it all began for the manufacturer.

During our interview with Will Verity, Range Rover’s Brand Design Chief, he tells us that the idea of time travel for the Milan installation with NUOVA pivots back to Design Miami 2024. ‘We were presenting one of our new bespoke vehicles there, and Nuova was also presenting a 1971 capsule. Then, we started talking about how 1970 is such an important moment for Range Rover, being the founding date, and the 1970s in general. We then talked about how we could do something together where we celebrate Range Rover’s heritage in its past, but also celebrate its future, where we’re moving to, and have this time travel moment between these two time zones, using the vehicles as props within this scenography that celebrates both,’ he says.

all images courtesy of Range Rover | photos by Pietro Cocco

1970s interiors with classic vehicle in original bodywork

The design studio NUOVA captures the 1970s setting of a Range Rover dealership. The moment the doors open, red carpet covers the entire flooring. A classic Range Rover vehicle in its original olive green bodywork greets the visitors. Its windows have no tint, making its seventies interior and raw-like leather cabin skin so visible from the outside. On the left, a wall-to-wall mirror expands the space, creating a moment of distortion: what year is it? Varnished wood clothes the room alongside rich, tactile textures. NUOVA brings over a series of custom furniture pieces: an oxblood red sofa, a circular version of their Enzo table in white Carrara marble, desk chairs.

It’s not the 1970s corporate setup without a fish tank, archival artifacts, and original sketches from the Range Rover design process. A song from the era plays in the background, muffled by a static that’s reminiscent of the radios crooning in the wild afternoon or intimate dinner. The smell of old dollar bills and leather sprays across the room, courtesy of Grand Rose, an incense-like fragrance. It’s an interactive theater, too. Actors wear 1970s workwear and British fashion by LA-based luxury garment atelier L’Equip. They converse with the visitors, asking them questions and answering inquiries, living through the past without an idea of the modern world outside the wooden room.

the first room revives a Range Rover car dealership in the 1970s

Future filled with pillars of mirror and rebuffed car

Then, it’s time to head to the future. There’s a single door separating 1970 and 2025. One of the actors announces the departure from the past. They thank the visitors, and as soon as they open the door to the next space, white light, ambient sounds, and a custom cool scent, Wet Stone, flood in. The time travel that Range Rover imagines for its installation in Milan has begun. In this capsule, every furniture piece from the past, as well as the decorative objects and the previous room’s earthliness, disappears. What remains is the use of mirrors.

Instead of extending from wall to wall, it comes through as pillars. They stand equally spaced from one another in an open circle, ceremoniously surrounding the rebuffed classic Range Rover, blessing the modernized take within a contemporary ground. White stones pile below the visitors’ feet, constructing the amorphous floor. A strong white beam showers upon them from a large box of light on the ceiling. The ambiance feels pared back, away from any objects that dominate the wood-cladded space of the 1970s setup. Realization dawns: this is how studio NUOVA and Range Rover interpret the future.

objects reminiscing the 1970s Range Rover dealership form part of the installation

It’s not easy to maintain the heritage and history of Range Rover as a brand, and Will Verity reflects on this very challenge. There have been several generations of Range Rover to date, he says, but the vehicles’ proportions still keep their build familiar and traditional. The brand design chief admits, however, that they’ve refined the designs to their essence, cutting off unnecessary visual excess that has dominated their language in the past.

‘For us, the translation, what we’re trying to say, is that when you see the 1970s vehicle, it has a design language within the product itself. When you move to today, our vehicles share the same DNA, the same philosophy, and the same design language, but it’s looked at through the lens of modernism, through the lens of contemporary design practice. There is the same visual language within our products today, but that’s taken through everything we tried to create, going through the lens of trying to be as productive as possible, putting modernity at its heart,’ he tells us.

leather interior of the classic Range Rover vehicle in 1970s

It has taken Range Rover a lot of time before they produced an installation marking their history and documenting the facets of their vehicles that remain the same. When asked about this postponed timeline for entering into the installation industry, Will Verity says that the brand is going through a transitional moment. ‘We’re moving from Land Rover as a brand to having four distinct brands within Range Rover, Discovery, Defender, and Jaguar as part of the family. Because of that, we need to find new ways to have a voice independent from the wider group, stand on each brand’s own two feet, and find ways to communicate,’ he shares with us.

Now that the brand has had a taste of the artistic, scenographic, and experiential flair during Milan Design Week 2025, the Range Rover family plans to continue exploring this path. ‘I think we’d like to,’ says Will Verity. ‘We’re continuing our relationship with Design Miami in the US. We’d love to come back every year and show here as well in Milan. It’s been a great learning opportunity to come and do our first one. There are a lot of takeaways that we’d like to evolve over the next 20 years.’

the vehicle retains its original Olive Green bodywork