Our communications team at Sentinel Aviation often share articles about private jet powerhouses such as Bombardier and Gulfstream and to a lesser degree the commercial planemakers Airbus and Boeing. We sometimes forget to focus on some of the key names behind the scenes that are integral to the aircraft formation process.

Austria’s F/List is one such name. F/List is an interior design pioneer reshaping the luxury design world within the business and private jet sphere – 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 market. The company has worked as a supplier to virtually every aviation OEM.

F/List traces its history back to 1950 when Franz List Senior founded the business. The Thomasberg-based outfit is currently headed by Katharina List-Nagl, who took over as CEO from her father in Franz List in 2017.

Image: F/List

While it is a family business, it’s no small operation. More than 1,000 employees, including engineers, designers, and technologists, are based in the country and across locations in the United States, Germany, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the UAE!

Recent Projects
With its innovative design and careful craftsmanship, F/List has left its mark throughout the cabins of numerous private aircraft worldwide. Prime examples of recent projects include:

Bombardier Global 6000: Cabin refurbishment for Niki Lauda.

Image: F/List

Pilatus PC-24: Aircraft interior; tabletop cover.

Image: F/List

Bombardier Challenger 350: Ergonomic interior.

Image: F/List

Embraer Lineage 1000E: Total cabin refurbishment.

Image: F/List

Boeing Business Jet 787: Entrance area, corridor, guest washroom, main bathroom & changing room.

Image: F/List

F/List’s management are keen to highlight that the company is focused on innovation, customisation, and sustainability. There is a clear commitment to quality, but the team is keen on continuing to disrupt the industry with its work. Also, it’s not only aircraft that it works on. The firm has a strong holding in the luxury yacht and residence fields.

Amid the company’s pioneering spirit in innovative luxury interiors, it officially opened its expanded ‘future laboratory’ this month, the F/LAB, which is promoted as a centre of innovation and a “dynamic hub for creative thinking, cross-discipline collaboration, and imaginative experimentation.” The launch transitioned the lab from an in-house concept to a critical part of the firm’s innovation strategy.

Image: F/List

The F/Lab consists of testing areas, workshops, and state-of-the-art equipment. There is also a showroom allowing the company to demonstrate projects to clients.

CEO List-Nagl: “With the F/LAB expansion, we are demonstrating that we are much more than just a manufacturer fulfilling design briefs. We are introducing the concept of 361° insight, which will see our colleagues not just visualising our customers’ world but working in tandem with them to realise their design dreams. Many of our customers own multiple high-value assets, and with our latest approach, we’ll seamlessly support the interior design and development of their jets, yachts, interior spaces, and residences across their portfolio, in partnership, from inception to installation.”

Image: F/List

The Shapeshifter Project
The imaginative work of F/List is best exemplified by the Shapeshifter project. This is a fresh interior concept distinguished by “flexible and dynamic pneumatic functions.” 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.

They work with wood, stone, metal, and novel biomaterials to transform interior components to adapt to the needs of the client while not sacrificing space limitations on board the aircraft. The company emphasises that with this approach, it can form “new solutions that were previously considered impossible.”

F/List states: “We have ignored physics and created a radical new concept that completely rethinks the use of interior spaces. Applying flexible biobased materials with dynamic pneumatic functions enables furniture and monuments to magically morph to create new solutions to optimise spatial constriction.”

Looking Ahead
Even though there have been significant investments in scaling up its in-house activity, F/List is proud of its partnerships and works robustly with other manufacturers to complete projects to perfection. The collaborative spirit is exemplified within the partnership with Nature Squared, an ethical design brand that creates hand-crafted sustainable surfaces made from natural materials such as eggshells and bamboo.

F\List has also been expanding well in the commercial space, collaborating on the business class products of the likes of Singapore Airlines and LATAM. We can expect more opportunities for F/List across its market segments in this next chapter as its facilities evolve both in Austria and abroad.