The RPS Guide to Private Jet Interior Design with Aurora Saboir
Plus: a rare look inside the ultra-secretive West Village condo 80 Clarkson, the Beverly Hills Hotel’s nightlife expansion and Miami private schools
Most people assume when someone buys a private jet the hard part is over. In reality that’s when the redesign usually begins.
I’ve known about the niche world of private jet interior designers for a long time — I actually discussed it with Ken Fulk during my stint at AD while working on a story about eight years ago. But I discovered Aurora Saboir, the founder and lead designer of Aurora Aero Design, a boutique studio based in Europe, through Lane Florsheim’s beautiful Wall Street Journal story a couple of weeks ago. The piece covered so much ground that I found myself wanting to know more about Saboir in particular, whose studio focuses almost entirely on private jet interiors.
Her clients are the kind of owners who buy a $70 or $80 million aircraft and then immediately start thinking about how to make the inside feel less like a plane and more like somewhere they’d actually want to spend fifteen hours. That might mean turning sections of the cabin into living rooms instead of rows of seats, designing bedrooms that feel closer to hotel suites, or experimenting with materials that read more residential than corporate.
Saboir works directly with private owners rather than manufacturers, which means the brief often starts with lifestyle rather than aviation. One client might want the plane designed almost entirely around sleep and recovery. Another wants a space where a large family can eat and watch movies together while crossing continents. She has also collaborated with people like Swizz Beatz, whose concept aircraft interior with Saboir caught attention across the aviation and design worlds.
She’s particularly interested in how the aircraft connects to the rest of a client’s luxury ecosystem. In some cases that means integrating objects like watches so they remain digitally linked to the aircraft even after the owner steps off the plane.
In the Q&A below, Saboir talks about how she accidentally ended up designing private jets during the pandemic, the moment when the world essentially ran out of aircraft during COVID, what private owners actually ask for when they customize a cabin, and why the next decade of private aviation interiors may revolve less around flashy luxury and more around technology, wellness, and a very different onboard experience.
And of course, it wouldn’t be RPS without the usual round-up of clever things to read, talk about, and pretend you discovered yourself. But that’s just the icing on the cake, isn’t it?
