In the foothills of the Austrian Alps, set amid bucolic farmland, is the global headquarters of F/List, a family-owned company that in the 35 years since its founding has become a major purveyor of luxury fittings and materials to the high-end aviation, yacht, and residential markets. The company has worked as a supplier to virtually every aviation OEM.
F/List says its sustainable innovations are deeply rooted in the company's philosophy, and during a recent visit by AIN, its material wizards showed off its newest product lines, which are making their way into first-class airline and private jet cabins, as well as onto opulent yachts. The company also displayed its in-house capabilities in research, development, and product testing.
Inspired by its Shapeshifter vision of a future where cabin furniture can morph into various shapes to allow customers to do more with the same space, F/List displayed a seemingly solid-wood credenza that can silently and swiftly change its shape into that of a desk using pneumatic actuators artfully concealed beneath a layer of flexible wood veneer. The company has put an identical unit through hundreds of cycles, with little sign of wear.
While most cabin outfitters consider side ledge storage bin covers "dead" space, the company also demonstrated a cordless cell phone charger built into the storage cover with a cradle depression that magically vanishes when the phone is removed. Lastly, it showed off the seamless wood door on a storage cabinet that simply retreats sideways around the corner and back of the unit, rather than opening outwards into what would be the aircraft aisle. “We decided that maybe with morphing components we can do something very special here, as in bend it around the edge,” said Melanie Prince, the company’s head of innovation.
While these designs remain a part of the potential future, the materials utilized in their construction, down to their electronics and actuators, were all made and extensively tested in-house. F/List employs staff from diverse disciplines—ranging from electronics and jewelers to automotive designers and chemical engineers—to develop its products. Once the functionality of a large-scale model of the actuator was approved, company technicians embarked on a mission to miniaturize it.
F/List, which first made a name for itself in the high-end space by outfitting yachts, is a master of wood-veneer technology, befitting its start as a carpentry shop. It takes extraordinary measures to acquire the most prime supplies of natural wood, which are then sliced into thin sheets. To ensure the wood grains match in each interior, every veneer sheet is numbered and cataloged, with all necessary parts mapped out on the sheet before the first cut is made. Those veneers can even be embossed with any design the customer desires. F/List has since branched out into stone veneers and metal cabin hardware and fittings.
Stemming from the Shapeshifter concept is the company’s line of Aenigma materials, which recently earned a Red Dot award in product design. It uses cutting-edge chemistry to fuse traditional jewelry techniques with aerospace technology to create a decorative, customizable material derived from high-performance natural fibers, metals, and a resin matrix. It can be produced in nearly limitless colors, textures, thicknesses, and patterns ranging from a metallic stingray skin theme to textured glowing geometric patterns. “When we started the Shapeshifter, we figured we would start with leather because leather can morph and bend, but it’s not really happy stretching,” Prince explained. “It sags and it creases so we said this is not going to work, so we needed to try to build our own material.” That Aenigma material, which is durable and stretchable, made its commercial debut in one of the company’s major yacht completions, which called for an abundance of stingray skin leather for wall coverings. “They needed about 1,000 stingrays on the wall and our team was feeling a little sad that we would need to kill that many stingrays, so they basically took one of the skins, created a mold, and without killing any further animals were able to reproduce stingray leather with a non-animal basis.”
Among the company's newest engineered materials is Whisper Leather, a sustainable plant-based alternative to ultra-leather. It is manufactured from a polymer derived from cornstarch, with a viscose backing. “What we wanted to do is a finish that is not only sustainable but is extremely customizable,” explained Prince. “We can make any texture you’d like, we can make any color you’d like, and we can make something that so far nobody else can do in the timeframe we can—we can create artwork.” As an example, she showed a painting reproduced as a side-wall covering, right down to the brush strokes, which was done in a matter of weeks. “So, you can have a collection of sidewalls commissioned by specific artists and you can have them on walls and rotate them in and out of the airplane,” noted Prince. She added that the material—which can be manufactured in a wide selection of surface finishes for sidewalls, bulkheads, or any area where a textile material is required—has already been certified and is flying aboard an aircraft.
F/List also showed off its sustainable Linfinium, a linseed oil-based recyclable product that can be used for anything from countertops to flexible flooring. Through the addition of ingredients such as stone dust (recycled from its stone shop), recycled cork, and even ground apricot pits, the company can alter the properties of the material to change its firmness and surface texture to match needs and service requirements. To provide a high-end sparkle to its products, it will add mother-of-pearl buttons from a local manufacturer of traditional clothing, which are ground up and mixed in. In addition to the limitless customization possibilities, Linfinium can be machined into any shape, with the material removed in the finishing process retained for eventual further use.
As its prowess in material engineering increased over the years to encompass a wide range of products including carbon-fiber composites, the company also developed a full suite of testing capabilities. These range from designing and building its own repetitive lifecycle testing rigs and the software that runs them to flammability, heat release, smoke, adherence, fluid resistance, UV resistance, and extreme-climate testing. In the past, F/List would even contract with outside companies to provide certification testing, but even with the ongoing expansion of its in-house testing division, the company is now far too busy with the testing of its own products to take on outside work.
According to Prince, the company basically covers “the entire ecosystem of the lifestyle of the ultra-high-net-worth individual,” and to better serve its customers in all three of the high-end markets it provides for, F/List (named after company founder Franz List) now has a global footprint with satellite facilities in Denver; Melbourne, Florida; Montreal; Sorocaba, Brazil; London; Berlin; and Dubai, UAE. Of the more than 1,000 F/List employees worldwide, 700 are based at its Thomasberg headquarters, which includes its primary manufacturing and final assembly facility.
To accommodate its growth, the company will break ground this year on Plant 3 at its home location, which currently offers 278,000 sq ft of production space. Plant 2 is largely dedicated to aviation serial production, and the completion of this 50,000-sq-ft facility will free up space through the relocation of
the aviation final assembly, quality review, and shipping departments.