COOL HUNTING Ferrari Roma Tailor Made’s Japanese Artisans: Copper – COOL HUNTING®

In 2019, Ferrari approached COOL HUNTING with a dream opportunity: to design a one-off vehicle that demonstrates the breadth and depth of the luxury automaker’s Tailor Made customization program. To pursue our distinct vision for what would become the Ferrari Roma Tailor Made, Specially Crafted for COOL HUNTING, we commissioned several Japanese artisans that we had visited during our CH Japan trip (and collaborated with on the CH Omakase collection) to make various components. These include a signature kamon (or house crest), sakiori (an upcycled textile woven with vintage kimonos), indigo-dyed leather and the car’s centerpiece, a dazzling copper shift plate by Kaikado.

Founded in Kyoto in 1875, Kaikado is known for hand-producing metal tea caddies. During our first brainstorm session in Ferrari’s Tailor Made studio in NYC, we brought a Kaikado tea caddy to share with the design team. In many ways, it became a guiding force in the partnership and the patina of the caddy a reflection of the work (and time) every one of us put toward building this dream.

Those patina-ed hues in our reference copper tea caddy informed our choice in wheel color, interior stitching and trim elements. We also tapped Kaikado’s sixth-generation owner, Takahiro Yagi, to oversee the copper coating of our custom H-shifter plate, or cancelletto. Notably, it’s the first time Ferrari has customized this element—an exception Flavio Manzone, Ferrari’s SVP of Design, felt compelled to make for this very special Roma. These copper attributes are an ode to Kaikado, and it’s another facet in a marriage between the many traditional Japanese attributes and the Roma’s exquisite contemporary Italian form.

Image by Irwin Wong