a five-minute escape from monterey car week
By the middle of Monterey Car Week, the entire peninsula is buzzing with engine noise. The days begin early and run late, with unveilings, concours lawns and drives up and down the coast, and supercars roaring into the night. When we hopped into the driver’s seat of the 2027 Lincoln Nautilus and closed the door, the contrast was immediate and welcome. We were sitting inside the new Eminent Hour Black Label interior, surrounded by deep purples and warm copper tones, about to spend five minutes just sitting still, something that’s fairly unusual during Car Week.
From the Nautilus’ 48-inch panoramic display, we chose a forest meditation. Sunlight glowed through trees and across soft grasses and a voice guided our breathing. The seat began a synchronized massage beneath us and fragrance pods integrated into the center console released scent into the cabin. Lincoln calls the system Rejuvenate, with five- and ten-minute experiences designed to coordinate visuals, sound, scent, and touch. For five minutes, the noise outside disappeared and we were asked to forget about everything outside.
After our meditative first look at the 2027 Lincoln Nautilus in Monterey, California, designboom spoke with Lincoln Design Director Christine Park Cheng to learn about her design process and the spirit of the newly refreshed car.
the refreshed Nautilus retains its broad horizontal profile for the 2027 model year | images © Lincoln
designing a place to reset
The brief pause we had inside the 2027 Lincoln Nautilus pointed to the larger idea behind the luxury brand‘s interiors. Christine Park Cheng and her team imagine the vehicle as a sanctuary for drivers whose time behind the wheel is usually bookended by two demanding parts of the day: work and home. Someone might pull into their driveway and linger inside the car for another five or ten minutes, just to give that time entirely to themselves before heading inside.
The idea was easy to understand after experiencing it during Monterey Car Week, a time when there is almost always somewhere else to be.
Christine Park Cheng notes that this emotional dimension is part of the reason people form such strong attachments to cars in the first place. ‘Cars are very emotional objects,’ she tells designboom. ‘People often associate themselves, who they are, what they represent with cars.‘ Designers intentionally build those associations into the experience, she continues, through the way a vehicle looks and how someone interacts with it.
‘It does something to your soul. It does something inside.‘ She has a way of speaking about her work that’s so poetic, while the decisions she describes are quite practical.
2027 Lincoln Nautilus introduces a wider grille and newly sculpted front bodywork
placing technology at the edge of your view
The panoramic screen is a good example of this balance between emotion and practicality. At 48 inches wide, it could easily dominate the Nautilus interior, especially in a cabin designed around reducing visual stress. Cheng explains that the team spent considerable time deciding exactly where it should sit. By shifting it forward to the base of the windshield, the display stays close to the driver’s natural sightline and farther away from the body.
‘Your eye can stay on the road, and you don’t have to keep refocusing your vision and attention,‘ she explains. Navigation and vehicle information remain spread across the panoramic display, and controls sit on a second screen closer to the driver.
This push and pull comes up repeatedly when Cheng talks about the Nautilus. A calming cabin still needs technology, and an expressive exterior (be it sophisticated or more exciting) begins with something as basic as proportion. She describes how she begins with the relationship between the body, cabin, and wheels, and how she establishes the stance before developing the surfaces around it.
For the 2027 refresh, the team concentrated much of its attention on the face. The grille grows wider, while the daytime running light signature gains more visual weight and the illuminated Lincoln star becomes larger. The hood and fenders have also been reshaped.
Eminent Hour draws its interior palette from the colors of a desert sunset
returning to a landscape through color
Curating the materials and tones for the Eminent Hour interior theme, Christine Park Cheng’s approach is quite personal. She speaks about its inspiration like she’s describing a place to which she’s been before and wants to experience again. The theme takes its colors from a desert at sunset, with warmer tones that drift to deep purples like the midnight sky. Copper-toned open-pore ash runs through the interior alongside warm stitching and dark upholstery overhead. Perforations throughout the interior surfaces are like a shimmering atmosphere rising.
‘When we design our Black Label themes, it’s never just, ‘Oh, these colors look good together. Let’s put them together,” she says. ‘There’s a narrative, there’s a theme, there’s a story. It’s very poetic.‘
The second new theme, Elysian Light, starts at another time of day. Cheng describes early morning sunlight reflecting off glimmering ocean water, with glowing clouds overhead. Lincoln translates that image through Soft Cloud leather and Still Water Blue accents, paired with pearlescent ash wood.
Cheng easily moves between poetic recollection and function when she talks about design. A landscape becomes a palette, or the position of a screen comes down to where the eye naturally wants to look. The emotional and practical decisions keep feeding each other throughout her process.
Elysian Light pairs Soft Cloud leather with Still Water Blue interior accents
a new face for the 2027 nautilus
This same thinking continues outside, where Lincoln has given the Nautilus a stronger front end without drastically changing its overall character. Cheng notes the wider grille and enlarged illuminated star, along with vertical details cascading across the grille inspired by a sprinkling of raindrops. On Black Label cars, these elements take on a radiant copper finish.
The body itself stays visually streamlined, including door handles integrated directly into the long sculpted crease traveling across the side of the vehicle. Instead of interrupting that line, the handle becomes part of it. Around the rear, slimmer lamps stretch horizontally beside the Lincoln lettering as a continuation of the team’s emphasis on long, low graphics.
Cheng emphasizes that automotive design creates ‘moving sculptures,’ though our strongest impression came while the car was standing still, the doors were closed against the engines outside, and forest light glimmered over the dashboard. Among overstimulating days spent racing between events across Monterey, those five minutes became one of the most welcome experiences of Car Week.
a 48-inch panoramic display stretches across the upper dashboard