MINI’s New Design Boss Door Handles, Giant Screens, Physical Buttons & the Brand’s Future

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There’s a certain kind of interview that tells you more about a brand’s direction than any press release ever could. When Top Gear sat down with Holger Hampf, MINI’s new design boss, and asked him to react to the most contested tropes in modern automotive design, the answers were direct, considered, and occasionally reassuring in ways the current MINI lineup hasn’t always been.

Hampf came up through industrial design before leading BMW’s Designworks consultancy, and that background was apparent from the moment MINI announced his appointment last October. The perspective is slightly different from what you’d expect: he thinks about objects, interaction, and tactility alongside form. In 2026, with MINI navigating a generation that has divided its own audience, that framing matters more than it might have a decade ago.

The J01 MINI Cooper, Aceman and Countryman all have flush door handles which helps with aero.

On flush door handles, he didn’t hesitate. “My Mini answer would be proper door handles, for sure. I like to cook; I like to be in the kitchen. I hate kitchens without door handles. It’s also very fitting to Mini, because a function needs to be obvious. A door handle can be a piece you really love to touch.” That’s not a throwaway answer. It’s a statement about design philosophy. MINI has, historically, understood that its identity lives in the details people actually touch, not in abstracted cleverness. Proper door handles are part of that contract with the driver.

Full-width infotainment screens got a cleaner rejection. “Mini has to strike a good balance between an analogue feel and a digital offering,” he said, adding that “it’s a small cabin and I find it overwhelming if there’s too much digital surface in a Mini.” That’s the right instinct, and it’s consistent with what the current generation MINI Cooper already does with its circular OLED display, which remains the only round interface in the industry. Hampf is proud of it: “It’s the first and still the only in the industry. So far, it hasn’t been copied. Maybe others are scared of a round interface?” Whether you love or merely tolerate that display, the point stands: it’s distinctive. In a segment increasingly populated by cars that look like tablets on wheels, that matters.

On buttons, he was careful but telling. He acknowledged their importance, confirmed MINI’s history gives him a useful foundation, and conspicuously declined to say whether the toggle bar is finished. “Is it the end of the toggle bar? Hmm, I’ll leave that out.” Read into that what you will. He also flagged something that should resonate with anyone who has wrestled with a central screen while driving: “A central display very often is distracting. The right information in the right place at the right time in a car makes it a safe environment.” That line is relevant context as MINI finalizes an LCI across the Cooper, Countryman, and Aceman, a refresh that Hampf has explicitly tied to customer feedback from the current generation.

Illuminated badges got the most pointed response, and it’s worth sitting with because the thinking is sharper than the usual design-speak. “My answer would be ‘a sea of sameness’. You see this once and a week later you see it five times. To me, these things are very dangerous because everyone seems to have the same idea, and then everyone has a lit-up logo and front light bar.” He described a test he runs with his design team: sketch a car normally, then sketch only its light signature on a dark page. The point is that MINI’s identity should still be legible at night through its two round headlights and grille alone. “Some of these things like light bars and lit logos, as a personal answer, I’m not a fan.” In a market where light signatures are increasingly impossible to distinguish from one another, that’s a conviction worth holding.

There’s a tension running through all of these answers. MINI is owned by BMW, and BMW Group has shown a consistent appetite in recent years for large touchscreens, flush surfaces, and digital maximalism. Hampf is navigating that institutional pressure while trying to articulate what makes MINI coherent as a brand. The arguments he’s making, analogue balance, tactile identity, legible design signatures, are essentially arguments for restraint. That’s harder to sell upward in an organization than novelty is.

What’s interesting isn’t just what Hampf said. It’s that the answers collectively form a coherent design philosophy, and one that’s beginning to show up in tangible decisions. We’ve already seen hints of it in the MINI x Deus Ex Machina concepts, where chunky physical switches, exposed seams, and deliberate tactility were treated as design virtues rather than compromises. We’ve seen it in the framing around what replaces the JCW GP, a performance variant built around character rather than circuit logic. And we’ve seen it, perhaps most pointedly, in his acknowledgment that the Rocketman concept still has a future, a small city car that would require MINI to commit to smallness again rather than scale.

For anyone who has watched MINI’s post-F56 identity get incrementally flattened by corporate design logic, this Top Gear interview offers something modest but real: evidence that the person now responsible for MINI’s appearance has a clear point of view about what the brand should and shouldn’t become. Whether that view survives contact with production schedules, platform sharing, and cost targets is a different question entirely. But the instincts, as stated here, are sound. That’s a better starting point than it sounds.

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