Gulfstream opened its reimagined London Sales and Design Center this spring, enabling continuity and an enhanced experience for customers between its Beverly Hills, Manhattan and London facilities as they design their aircraft cabins
Business aviation never runs short of ways to surprise and delight – and with its reworked London Sales and Design Center, Gulfstream found another. Stepping out of the lift in a Mayfair office building to find the very essence of Gulfstream distilled onto its fifth floor is quite the unexpected experience, the sight of familiar Gulfstream seats and cabin fixtures juxtaposed against a London skyline bathed in bright spring sunlight unforgettable.
Gulfstream has similar Sales and Design Centers in Beverly Hills and Manhattan, plus even more comprehensive facilities in Savannah, providing customers with an opportunity to look in detail at materials, explore design options and simply sit in a Gulfstream-inspired space with Gulfstream design experts. Reopened in May 2025, the London Sales and Design Center comprises several discrete areas, all brightly but sympathetically lit, with comfortable seating and, right opposite the lift, G700/G800 and G400 cabin mock-ups.
Other areas include a conference room and a design visualisation space, complete with an extraordinary 163-inch screen on which design iterations created using in-house software are displayed; the screen is known as the ‘Power Wall’. There is also a design showroom packed with leather, carpet and other samples. Except it feels spacious rather than packed, since much of the material is stowed away behind soft-opening doors or in smooth-opening drawers.
Mike Swift, Group VP International Sales, EMEA & APAC at Gulfstream, is based at the London Sales and Design Center. With three years’ experience at the London office, he says: “This location is very convenient for our customers from the UK and around the world. Many have family offices and homes here, and they like to shop in Mayfair and Knightsbridge.”
He explains that the London site needed to reflect the evolution of the Beverly Hills and Manhattan facilities and, given its ideal location, renovation was the way forward.
“Our customers no longer want to see pictures of an airplane. They want to feel materials and sit in seats. They also want to explore various schemes, play with floor plans and see them on a big screen, with live renderings. Now we can do that in London.”
The facilities enable a continuity that allows customers to perhaps begin their design definition in Manhattan and then pick up in London from exactly where they left off weeks or months later, or in whatever timeframe suits their schedule. “In the past our designers used to travel to customers with large cases of materials for exactly this reason and we still do that if the customer can’t reach one of our locations, but our customers find the experience in our design centres enjoyable, interactive and iterative,” Swift adds. He also emphasises that these are sales and design centres: “I’ve had the pleasure of selling aircraft in both our Manhattan and London offices, helped by our cabin mock-ups, which include several seat styles. Customers might have flown on the jet but didn’t like the seats in that aircraft, so they come in and we help them find the ideal seat. That’s a unique experience.”
Tray Crow, Gulfstream’s Director, Interior Design, notes that all the company’s sales and design centres were designed in house to help customers in the process of defining their own cabin designs. He explains: “Part of that process is the carpet. It’s aircraft carpet and immediately attaches the client to the materials available for the cabin. It enhances the customer experience, and we’ve found it critical to the design process.”
Gesturing toward the conference room ceiling, Crow adds: “We’ve used a wool fabric on the ceiling of this space to help with acoustics, but it also helps with acoustics in the aircraft. These touchpoints help us articulate how a material will look and feel on the aircraft. Even the covering on the lobby walls is custom-coloured, aviation-grade leather.”
Describing his job as “the most fun in the company because we get to surprise and delight our customers and bring their visions to life”, Crow continues: “One of the ways we do that is by making sure we have enough time to make it happen. Specifying an aircraft can take anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the complexity of the design, the model selected and the mission. Our goal is to make that process fun and enjoyable.
“Technology is part of that, and we’ve invested significantly in developing technology that helps support specifying an aircraft. There’s a myriad of configurations and we have applications, including Cabin Layout for the iPad, to help the customer define their ideal configuration. Possible floorplans for the G700, for example, run into the thousands and we can demonstrate those on the iPad.
“With the floorplan defined we like to use another in-house tool. Cabin Creator helps envision the cabin in three dimensions, including making initial decisions on materials and colour combinations. That, combined with the detail we can get into here of seat style, stitching and the work we can do to create a bespoke seat, really helps the customer’s design evolution.”
Design Studio
Senior Principal Designer Mike Bryden is based at the London location. He came to Gulfstream from Rolls-Royce Motor Cars three years ago. In the design showroom, he explains: “We keep everything behind doors so it’s not so overwhelming when customers walk in. Instead, we’ll set up for a particular meeting, typically choosing to display materials based on their current aircraft, plus some wild cards.” The process differs for customers new to aircraft ownership, but most will have at least some initial ideas that Bryden and the team build upon.
“We create theme boards that show how the design might fit in with their lifestyle or other influences. We could choose materials for an oceanic theme, for example, showing how it translates into the cabin. We can also show how key areas, like the carpet, can be used as a canvas for other features or as a feature themselves.” The materials used in the design showroom, including the carpet, are to aircraft specification. Photo-realistic renderings and, increasingly, animations, are then used to enable customers to ‘walk through’ their interim cabin design.
Most Gulfstreams share an iconic window shape. Those large transparent ovals flood the cabin with natural light, providing a spectacle difficult to replicate in a London building. “We worked with a lighting consultant for the lighting in this space,” Bryden explains. “We kept the maximum amount of natural daylight coming in, but I had a customer who chose materials in this room and then wanted to see them in his current aircraft, so I took them onboard. We’re always happy to do that.”
The G700/G800 and G400 cabin mock-ups are fully equipped with representative seats, each accommodating a variety of styles. The differences between seats, defined by materials, stitching, piping, padding and actuation are surprisingly obvious when so many options are presented in one space. A further selection of stand-alone seats is fun to hop between but also serves to emphasise just how many options are available and how critical the detail is.
Swift says that with the changing customer demographic of recent years, first-time aircraft owners are no longer unusual for Gulfstream. The sales and design centres are often especially useful in these cases, because there is an education element to helping these customers understand exactly what designing a Gulfstream cabin means, and a visit to a design centre is often a step towards their deciding to order an aircraft. More traditional, seasoned customers are typically likely to choose their aircraft model and then define a cabin specification.
Whatever the customer type, having a complete selection of Gulfstream design tools and materials in one space ensures the optimum outcome for the buyer and makes the process of cabin definition a fulfilling experience in which the customer can be as involved as they wish. With three sales and design centres in locations popular with its customers, Gulfstream has also ensured that a single design space exists, delivering continuity across the widest possible geography.