Award-winning furniture and motorcycle designer Sacha Lakic puts pen to plane.

Given the theme behind his armchairs and motorbikes, it’s little surprise that Sacha Lakic leapt at the chance to draft a dream plane for Private Air’s inaugural Sketchpad feature. “Even when I’m designing furniture, I try to bring the same strong emotional sensation of movement,” says the award-winning 42-year-old French designer, who started at Peugeot in the late ’80s before making his name with sleek vehicles such as the 996cc Voxan Charade motorcycle and the Venturi Fetish, the world’s first production electric sports car. “I believe that a product in movement is a product which is alive, which has a soul.”

Lakic’s still-unnamed plane is “big enough to have an interior designed like a contemporary house,” he says. “But it’s also smooth and technological, and not too futuristic.”

Its killer app, though, is its ability “to land and take off vertically.” Exactly how it would do so Lakic hasn’t figured out yet (and, to be fair, that wasn’t part of the assignment). His creation, he says, is more of a “personal vision.” When he was 8, he saw his first Mustang on the streets of Paris and went on a mad drawing spree; his Private Air creation is in the spirit of those designs. Not that he wouldn’t like to have a roomy, chic, vertical-landing craft for popping in and out of meetings in Paris, Tokyo and Milan. “Hmm,” he muses, “maybe this could be a first step.”

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