bonacina and garage italia turn fiat 500 spiaggina in summer pink car with woven rattan seats

Bonacina’s custom fiat 500 spiaggina with garage italia

Furniture brand Bonacina splashes summer pink for its custom – and the successor to its topless, powder blue version – Fiat 500 Spiaggina and makes the car design beach-ready by planting woven rattan chairs as its interior seats. Bonacina joins the pink wagon – and the Barbieland as seen in the doll’s recently renovated Malibu dreamhouse – for its return to the automotive industry. It taps Garage Italia Customs to personalize the new fully electric Fiat 500 Spiaggina car with its signature woven rattan seats and take it further with an all-pink design hooded with light tarpaulin and white framing.

Rechargeable in just a few hours and from any domestic power socket, the Fiat 500 car is transformed with rattan-core woven seats, resuming the first version designed by Vittorio Bonacina in the 1950s, which became part of the collective vision of the ‘dolce vita’ (a seeming sibling of the new Fiat Topolino Dolcevita that exudes the Italian-summer spirit). The main difference between the new 500 Spiaggina and Vittorio Bonacina’s version is in the color hues. While the first models were made out of rattan core in its natural shade, the Fiat 500 Spiaggina can be produced in any color chosen by Garage Italia’s customers.

header photo by Filippo Ferrarese | images courtesy of Bonacina

Courtesy car in como area for the guests

It was Elia Bonacina himself who introduced the idea of aniline-dyeing seats, giving customers the chance to customize their Fiat 500 Spiaggina and match the color of the bodywork. Bonacina and Garage Italia share a common passion for customization, paving the way for them to explore new ways a Fiat 500 can look. ‘With Garage Italia being an extremely creative company and Bonacina having so many different types of weave techniques and weaving materials, a fabulous window has opened up. There are several new scenarios for thinking about innovative seats, gadgets, and car modifications with different types of weaving options,’ says Elia Bonacina, CEO of Bonacina.

The Fiat 500 Spiaggina will become a company mascot for Bonacina in all of its future projects in Italy and abroad. It also plans to welcome its guests in the Como area, where the company’s headquarter is based, and use it as a courtesy car from the Galleria Giardino Museum, inaugurated in early 2023, to the nearby production pole. ‘It was nice to travel back in time with our craftspeople, we found ourselves with the same bare seat of the classic version and had to figure out how to weave our material within its metal skeleton. This has been developed with our philosophy in mind: creating a product that lasts over time and offering an ergonomic and comfortable solution, as for all the products that we design and manufacture,’ adds Bonacina.

Bonacina and Garage Italia turn Fiat 500 Spiaggina in summer pink with woven rattan car seats