The Road Is My Catwalk™
KAHN® is Britain's automotive fashion house: a design company built on the conviction that an automobile is never merely a means of travel, but a considered expression of the person who commissions it.
Est. 1998 · West Yorkshire & Cheyne Walk, Chelsea
An obsession, made in Yorkshire
A car, like a well-cut suit, succeeds or fails on balance alone.
Every company of consequence begins with a single fixation. For Afzal Kahn it was line and proportion. He trained in architecture, but the discipline could not hold him. The automobile could.
What began in West Yorkshire as one man's exacting eye has become one of the most recognisable names in automotive design anywhere in the world. And it began before there was an industry to join: when Afzal Kahn started designing for the road in the mid-1990s, luxury aftermarket vehicle design barely existed. KAHN® was among the very first companies of its kind, and it wrote the rules the rest would follow.
The wheel that started it all
A small canvas on which to announce a design philosophy.
In 1996 Afzal Kahn drew the RS-R, an alloy wheel unlike anything then on the road, its spokes appearing to flow uninterrupted to the very edge of the rim. The first production run of one thousand sold out entirely, and from that success A. Kahn Design was founded in 1998.
The wheel remains the KAHN® signature, and it is where every transformation still begins. Each is treated as a piece of design in its own right: sculpted, weighted and proportioned to the car it dresses. Countless imitators have borrowed the language since. It was written here first.
The Range Rover, reconsidered
The restraint of a Savile Row alteration, not the excess of the tuning trade.
If the wheel was KAHN®'s first word, the Range Rover became its native language. From the early 2000s the company made Britain's great luxury car its principal canvas, refining its stance, its detailing and its interior appointments.
Widened arches drawn with discipline, interiors retrimmed by hand in the company's own leather atelier, exterior jewellery machined rather than moulded: the KAHN® Range Rover established a template an entire industry has been following ever since.
“We take the best that exists and refine it. When it doesn't exist, we design it.”
A growing family of marques
Four houses, one exacting eye.
The pioneering instinct has never rested. Each marque carries a distinct focus and the same discipline.
Chelsea Truck Company
2013Defender · Wrangler · G-Wagon
Quietly subversive: take the world's most utilitarian machines and finish them to the standard of a gentleman's club. Military silhouette outside; quilted leather, machined aluminium and hand-finished detail within.
Flying Huntsman
2014Coachbuilt Defender derivatives
Where Chelsea Truck refined, Flying Huntsman re-engineered. The Longnose derivatives shown at Geneva were stretched, re-proportioned and re-powered; the 6x6 Civilian Carrier was proof KAHN® had outgrown the aftermarket entirely.
Racing Green Automotive
RecentRange Rover · Range Rover Sport
Three decades of KAHN® expertise on Britain's flagship luxury vehicles, distilled into a dedicated collection of enhancements, in a name that salutes the nation's motoring heritage.
Designio
RecentFiat 500e · city cars
Proof that great design has nothing to do with size. Designio brings the KAHN® philosophy to the small city car, beginning with the electric icon of the urban street, reimagined with the care of any grand tourer.
The Vengeance
Hammer and wheel, rather than press and mould.
Every ambition the company had nurtured converged in a single motor car. Unveiled at the 2016 Geneva Motor Show, the WB12 Vengeance was a coachbuilt British grand tourer designed by Afzal Kahn on Aston Martin's V12 architecture.
Almost nothing of the donor car's exterior survived. Wings, doors, bonnet and roof were shaped by hand in aluminium, finished with a billet grille and carbon fibre detailing. Beneath it, 5.9 litres and 510 horsepower. Production was deliberately scarce; in 2017 the Volante followed, limited to three examples.
The Vengeance announced the revival of a discipline Britain had all but surrendered. The journey from a single alloy wheel to a coachbuilt V12 grand tourer took twenty years. Few companies in automotive history have made it at all.
Recognition
The world has taken note.
- Autocar
- Crowned Afzal Kahn “the King of Car Customisation”
- Car Magazine
- Lifetime Achievement Award
- On screen
- Edge of Tomorrow · the Fast & Furious franchise
- Two decades of awards
- For design, innovation and enterprise
A new era
Designed in Britain. Driven everywhere.
Thirty years after it helped invent an industry, KAHN® is opening its design studio to the wider automotive world: the same eye that shaped the Vengeance, placed at the service of other manufacturers and marques.
This is more than commercial ambition. At a moment when the global industry is being reshaped, KAHN® stands unapologetically for British engineering and innovation, for the protection of British and European car design, and for keeping the great trades alive, coachbuilding above all.
Design, engineering, coachwork and trim are executed under the company's own roof, in Britain, as they have been from the beginning.
Thirty years on from the first wheel, the obsession is undimmed, and the catwalk is longer than ever.
Talk to the studio