PINTO is the only studio in this Part that designs hotels, yachts and aircraft with the same hand, and the aircraft came last.
Position
Founded by Alberto Pinto and now led by his sister Linda with a team of around eighty, the Paris studio works across private residences, offices, airports, hotels, yachts and jets. Its hotel work includes La Mamounia in Marrakech and The Dorchester in London; its aviation work runs from a Boeing 747-8 and BBJ 737 through a Gulfstream G550 and Bombardier Global to the world’s first ACJ320neo, designed for Acropolis Aviation and fitted out at AMAC in Basel over thirteen months, delivered as G-KELT — nineteen seats, sleeping seventeen, and a cabin altitude averaging 6,400 feet.
Why it is in the Library
It settles the question the rest of Part VIII circles. The studio entered aviation in 2000, as an extension of what it already did for a client base that travelled — the same people, the same expectations, a different room. That is the Library’s own thesis about this Part stated by a practitioner, and it is the reason the aviation work reads as hospitality rather than as transport design.
What this model does not solve
Every decorative element in an aircraft must be certified, which is a constraint no hotel or yacht imposes and which quietly limits how far a designer’s hand can carry across the three. ⚑ Alberto Pinto died in 2012; the studio continues under his name, which is licensing of a kind — the same question Part VII asks of maison residences, and it applies here too.