BorromeodeSilva
The Restomod Whisperers

(Restomods) It’s lunch time at BorromeodeSilva (BDS) and I find myself sitting with the entire studio team of about 10 people around a huge conference room table, eating salads out of plastic containers purchased five minutes ago in a local Carrefour. We are playing games on a big 100 inch TV. The aim is to guess where an image has been taken, as well as when. Few clues are given, so the entire team is invested in deciphering the puzzle. Fortunately, after one image taken on Wall Street in New York in the 1920’s, a familiar photograph comes up. Warsaw, 120 Chmielna Street, in front of the Municipal Police headquarters. As a parking ticket veteran, I guess both the place and year perfectly – 1995. Maximum points. The team cheers!

For me, having known the BDS team for a number of years already, this small moment illustrates perfectly the office’s atmosphere—one that employs its own “Chief Vibe Inspector” (yes, that is an actual job title). Born from a partnership between Italian aristocrat, Carlo Borromeo, and Fabio de Silva, the son of one of the world’s most celebrated car designers, and set in a discreet historic building in the center of Milan, BorromeodeSilva is, like the city itself, a palimpsest of luck—contradictions that somehow, and against better judgement, work together perfectly.

Before we begin, a quick look at the office space. It’s hard to go beyond the gigantic moodboard of objects, each one cooler than the other. Here, a dinosaur egg sits next to a pair of motocross gloves. There, an F1 steering wheel occupies shelf space together with a lion’s skull (don’t panic, it’s an antique from a closed-down school). A Lancia Delta S4 model nailed to the wall feels entirely at home in a space filled with a carbon fiber paddleboard designed by the studio, chocolates shaped like cars by BDS, a horseshoe-shaped Bugatti grille resting on the floor, and a large vintage Olympic rowing boat—gifted to Borromeo by his wife, fashion designer, Marta Ferri, as a wedding present—that has been since transformed into a lamp. Various books are carefully placed on the marble staircase, as well as sculptures by Benedict Radcliffe and Chris Labrooy. The office bears the imprint of years of collecting, its contents striking yet effortlessly curated.

What Exactly is a Restomod?
All of that, however colorful the background may be, is ultimately beside the point. Founded by two childhood friends who started with a small team working around a single long table—now Borromeo’s desk (incidentally all of these people still work for the company). BDS is responsible for three of the most coveted cars in Europe: the Automobili Amos Lancia Delta Futurista, the Porsche-based 928 Nardone, and the Eccentrica, built on the chassis of the first generation Lamborghini Diablo.

I ask Borromeo, who is not only BDS’s Creative Director, but also the company’s spokesperson, what the secret to this success story was. “There is no secret sauce,” he says quoting Kung Fu Panda. “Just a series of components that clicked at the right time and in the right place.”

The story starts with Borromeo’s friendship with Eugenio Amos—an Italian racing driver, entrepreneur, and classic car collector. One day, the two were sitting together, amusing themselves with the idea that Amos’s name sounded like a car brand. As they toyed with the thought, Amos—himself a Dakar Rally regular—pointed to the success of California‑based Singer Vehicle Design and its restomodded Porsches. “If a British guy can do this with a German car in California,” he remarked, “just imagine what a group of Italians could do with an Italian one.”And so the spark was ignited. The only thing left was to choose the right car.

Let’s pause here. To understand the restomod concept, Singer provides a clear example. The idea emerged from a potent mix of nostalgia and a distinctly American tradition of modifying cars—often in pursuit of greater speed. Its roots lie in the post‑war, car‑obsessed “Atomic Age” generation of the original baby boomers. It is a culture memorably depicted in Lucas’s American Graffiti, set in a moment when young people customized their grandfathers’ George aging Fords, Mercurys, and Chevrolets as an assertion of personal freedom and independence from established rules. The major manufacturers soon recognized this desire, responding in the era of the muscle car, before the impulse later evolved into a form of tuning largely detached from motorsport.

All of this finds its most complete expression in the restomod scene. A restomod is not simply a car updated for comfort or speed, but one that captures the cultural meaning a particular car holds for those who care about it.

“A good example of this is the Lamborghini Diablo, a car that adorned the walls of many childhood bedrooms,” Borromeo says. “It looks like the fastest spaceship in the universe, but if you try to drive it now…” He pauses. “Well, they say you should never meet your heroes! What we want to do with our Diablo restomod is to give people back the dream they had of that car, now that they can maybe afford it. And to make sure their idea of that machine matches reality.”

The Actual Secret Sauce
It is important to understand at this point that BorromeoDeSilva operates as a one‑stop agency, extending far beyond car design to encompass product development as well as integrated communication, marketing, and sales services. This is well demonstrated by the multitude of logos displayed along one of the office walls, as well as the large portfolio behind Carlo’s desk, which features items such as boats, glasses, furniture, and even a fridge. What’s interesting is that neither Borromeo nor de Silva is directly responsible for designing the cars mentioned here. Of course, the entire company contributes ideas to the process, as both partners are trained designers. In Fabio’s case, however, it is product design rather than automotive design that keeps things going when car projects are not coming in thick and fast (another team member is Filippo Sgalbazzi, also a highly regarded product designer). The team is also remarkably lean, with Marco Biancullo, the Head of Design, doing most of the work both inside and outside on the restomods BDS has in the pipeline, while others assist with tasks such as 3D modelling, defining colour and trim options, creating marketing graphics, and developing social media strategy.

I ask Biancullo what it takes to reinvent the shape of such an icon—for example, the Porsche 928, a car that already looked as though it had come from the future when it debuted. “We start with working the proportions carefully and with consideration, making the car more aggressive, more up-to-date, as well as making sure that we get rid of all the materials that were compromised on in the past—bad plastic, for example,” Biancullo says.

“We purify everything and make the ‘idea’ of the car shine through. We can do this by making the car more minimalistic—like we did with the Nardone, creating an even more elegant GT cruiser that speaks of more performance and a more engaging drive. We can also, if needed, accentuate certain features like the pop-cultural atmosphere of the time the original came from, just by using modern technology.”

I ask whether he worries that his work might be viewed as sacrilegious, in the sense that it dismantles the vision of legendary designers such as Marcello Gandini, who authored the original Diablo. “No,” Biancullo replies quickly. “I think that someone once asked Gandini to redo the Countach. His answer was that, as he wasn’t interested in looking to the past, only to the future, he was willing to do it on one condition: He would do whatever he wanted, and the car probably wouldn’t resemble the original Countach in any way. The investor wasn’t interested.”

The Power of a Good Story
“As Italians from Milan, in many ways we live in the ruins of a better past, so we know very well how to understand style over time and the power of nostalgia,” Carlo Borromeo says. This may explain how BDS has been able to launch so many commercially successful projects over the years.

A great restomod—whether the Futurista, Eccentrica, or Nardone—is defined not only by design and engineering; innovative storytelling is also key. “It’s something that we understood very quickly; when we launched the Futurista, our Instagram account went from 8,000 followers to 35,000 in half an hour. We knew we had tapped into something important.” 

At first, the BDS team was taken aback by their success. As car designers, they had set out to do something new rather than rework existing forms. It soon became clear, however, that their approach resonated precisely because it was authentically rooted in their Milanese identity. “We are not rock star designers that only do things their way,” Borromeo says. “We adapt to the vision of our clients and it’s precisely what they bring to the table that makes each story of each car unique. A French man (Thierry Nardone) who is in love with transaxle Porsches is very different from a Lamborghini collector from San Marino (Emanuel Colombini, CEO of Colombini Group, owner of Febal Casa), or from a Dakar driver from Varese (Amos).”

He draws a parallel with the Swiss watch industry’s response to Japanese quartz innovation, where increased precision was met not by imitation but by a renewed emphasis on mechanical craftsmanship. “We might not know how to make the best electric car in Europe or how to deliver a car as a service,” Borromeo says. “But we sure as hell do know how to make a very compelling internal combustion car that might not be faster than whatever is coming out of China, but can deliver an amazing driving experience.”

Borromeo also points out that it is important to understand that not every car is suitable for a restomod. The machine needs to be culturally relevant and have a place in both pop culture and people’s hearts. He believes that, for this reason, the most interesting restomods could actually be based on more ordinary cars.The obstacle, however, is economic. It is unlikely that a client would pay €500,000 for his dream restomod—the Fiat Multipla. “On top of all the work you do in a design studio, you need a company like Podium that can take all of our silly ideas and then turn them into reality.”

Somewhere in the Aosta Valley
It’s pouring with rain as I drive down towards Turin and the Aosta Valley, where Podium Advanced Technologies is located. The facility is dramatic in its setting, wedged between mountains, flanked by waterfalls, and overlooked by a large castle that looms above its ultra‑modern silver halls. An Eccentrica on a test drive passes my rental car with a thunderous exhaust soundtrack and disappears into the building. For me, it’s the visitors’ parking lot.

Podium is an engineering powerhouse, developing and building cars for small manufacturers such as BDS’s clients, as well as for Italian legend Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera. It also works with Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, with whom it successfully competed at Le Mans in 2023. In a fully robotized section of the facility, Podium additionally produces batteries and powertrains for Formula E cars. It appears that the inherently volatile business of restomods is a pleasant side hustle.

Luca Ciancetti, Development Manager at Podium Advanced Technologies, greets me at the entrance of a building that looks more like Google’s headquarters than a car factory, and leads me through the facility as various cars are being assembled. “Our companies grew up together. As like everything in Italy, the relationship started over dinner—with Eugenio Amos and Carlo Borromeo present when we were discussing the Futurista project,” Ciancetti says. “The strongest part of working together is that we are involved in the design process from day one. It’s also important that when we start a project together, the client already has a specific idea of how much the thing will cost and therefore the economic viability of the entire build.”

This approach not only streamlines the entire process but also affects development times, an element that is equally important to Carlo Borromeo. “There is nothing scarier than if you give a designer absolute freedom; this type of relationship makes the feedback loops shorter and allows us to cut the unnecessary discussions and make quick decisions that simply work,” he says.

Does this automotive niche have any future? For Borromeo, it’s an emphatic yes. “In a world where automotive ideas change from year to year, we want to be the studio that behaves like the Swiss watch industry. To create timeless objects that are not going to age—what we internally call a ‘Generational Car’—with no intrinsic obsolescence planned in,” he says.