thecountrydriver  

A HANDFUL of classic car enthusiasts might recall his name but Count Alexis Wladimirovich de Sakhnoffsky was likely one of the world’s finest and prolific car designers most folks had never heard of.

 

Google ‘world’s top car designers’ and you’ll find Giugaro, PininFarina, Bertone, Scaglietti, Buehrig, Brooks Stevens and a dozen more, but there’s no mention of the Russian nobleman.

 

More than exotic cars, he also designed items as diverse as speedboats and furniture, radios and footwear – and the world’s most famous beer tanker.

 

As well, within six years of becoming a US citizen, he served in WWII with the lofty rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

 

Alexis de Sakhnoffsky certainly had a bizarre life.

 

He was born in Kiev, which was in Russia at the time, in November 1901.

 

His father, Count Wladimir de Sakhnoffsky, was a quiet, scientifically inclined nobleman and the private financial advisor to Czar Nicholas II, while his mother was the granddaughter of the Russian sugar magnate and industrialist Artemon Terestchenko, one of the wealthiest men in Czarist Russia.

 

Her father, Nicola Terestchenko, inherited Artemon’s business and fortune, which was handed down to his children.

 

The extent of the immense wealth of Alexis' mother's family can be seen in the family's yacht, the Iolanda.

 

Built in 1908 in Scotland by Ramage and Ferguson Shipyards, Iolanda was the world’s second largest steam yacht.

 

It was bought in 1911 from its original owner, Commodore Morton Plant, and it sailed the Mediterranean and Baltic seas carrying the scions of Europe as well as members of the Russian Imperial family, which almost certainly included young Count Alexis.

 

He grew up in a five-storey mansion whose staff of 18 included a French governess and British nurse from whom he learnt French and English.

 

But the fairytale turned to a nightmare when Czar Nicholas II was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of March 1917, which itself was overthrown by the Bolsheviks seven months later.

 

Due to their wealth the Terestchenko family were easy targets for the Bolsheviks.

Alexis’ father committed suicide in August,1918.

 

Luckily an aunt in Marseilles arranged for Alexis, his mother and sisters, to be smuggled out of the country in January 1920.

 

Alexis was left with 1000 rubles and a 5.5 carat diamond ring.

 

He was safe, but no longer wealthy, so his aunt financed a stay in Switzerland where he enrolled in the engineering program at the University of Lausanne.

 

After three years of school, he ran out of money and moved to Paris where he began sketching gowns, which he hoped to sell to couturiers.

 

"But a style designer can't get anywhere in Paris unless he can also cut and fit dresses," he later explained.

 

"So, I could get only 17 or 20 francs for a sketch, and even then, didn't make a sale very often."

 

With his fashion career at a standstill, he took a course in design at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Bruxelles, Belgium and to help finance the move he began looking for a job in the city.

 

By chance, Thomas Hibbard, a partner in the Franco-American design firm of Carrosserie Hibbard et Darrin, happened to be in Carrosserie Van den Plas' Bruxelles office in late 1923 when young de Sakhnoffsky came by looking for work.

 

His portfolio did not have any renderings of cars and consisted of detailed drawings of women's clothing and accessories.

 

However, his talents were obvious, and he was hired on the spot by Antoine Van den Plas as a junior draughtsman at 750 francs a month.

 

His multi-linguistic talents were also an asset, and he served as translator whenever one of the firm's international clients visited the shop.

 

As Van den Plas directors also served on the boards of Minerva, Metallurgique and Imperia, the company was the coachbuilder of choice for the three Belgian-built chassis.

 

Before long Alexis was given more responsibility and began executing final renderings of selected model bodies for Van den Plas’ wealthy clients who liked the streamlined style of his work.

 

For five years Count Sakhnoffsky was art director of the Van Den Plas Company, coach builders of Brussels, and during that time his successes were manifold: cars of his design won five consecutive Grand Prix awards at the annual Monte Carlo Elegance events.

 

He also won the Grand Prix at Bournemouth for automobile body designs, and a special body designed by him for the Cord front-wheel drive car won the Grand Prix at Paris, Monte Carlo and Beaulieu in 1930.

 

While at Van den Plas in 1929, he met and married Madeleine Parlongue, an impressive lass who also worked at the company.

 

During WWI she had risked her life for her country in the intelligence service.

 

Apart from many citations for her bravery, she had a pretty face and that indefinite something the stylist loved: chic.

 

However, she divorced him in 1935, citing his ‘many girlfriends.’

 

One of them apparently was Ethelene Frasier, who he married in August 1935, but she left him in 1941 because of his affair with ‘a streamlined blonde’ and he married Joan Morris the same year.

 

Most of the Belgian coachbuilder’s work was on the associated Minerva chassis although they produced bodies for all the major European and American luxury chassis at one time or another.

 

Van den Plas is known to have built on Bentley, Benz, Buick, Cadillac, Excelsior, Fiat, Gräf und Stift, Hispano-Suiza, Imperia, Isotta-Fraschini, Mercedes, Métallurgique, Packard, Panhard, Rolls-Royce, Puch, Stutz and Voisin, among others.

 

The 1934 bankruptcy of Minerva also caused the similar fate of Van den Plas in the following year, its last known project being a Torpedo Roadster on a Duesenberg Model J chassis.

 

Content with his reputation as one of Europe's top car designers, de Sakhnoffsky set his sights on his next goal: repeating his Continental success in America.

 

 "That required some preparation,” he said.

 

“I needed recognition outside of Belgium but could not afford a publicity agent. I decided to start building myself up by contributing to automotive trade publications and though I had no training as a writer, I was fortunate to have acquired early in my life command of French, English and German.

 

“Also, my interest in cars helped me gather a working knowledge of technical terms.

 

“Soon I was writing monthly articles on automotive design trends for 'L'Equipment Automobile’, an influential Paris publication, and 'Autobody', a popular New York trade magazine.

 

"Both carried my by-line and address.”

 

By early 1928 de Sakhnoffsky's contributions to Autobody began to pay off.

 

The first offer came from General Motors, who offered him a six-month contract, but he declined.

 

Soon after, he was contracted as art director with Hayes Design at Grand Rapids and influenced the design of many of the classy cars of the time, among them American Austin, Auburn, DeVaux, Franklin, Marmon, Peerless, Reo, Roosevelt and Studebaker.

 

Next, he went solo as a freelance consultant and opened offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, New York City and Philadelphia.

 

His talent for graphics and line drawings extended his influence and his illustrations appeared in countless magazines.

 

His automotive clients included Bantam, Crosley, Ford, Kaiser-Frazer, LaFayette, LaSalle, Mack, Nash, Packard, Tucker, White trucks and Willys-Overland.

 

He also designed trailers for Budd, trucks for Indiana and car bodies for the Murray Corporation.

 

With seemingly no end in sight to his talents, he also designed numerous non-automotive products, such as boat hardware for Attwood Mfg,  Brown Derby tableware, the World's Fair exhibit for Chrysler Corp, the Earl Carroll Theatre, Emerson radios – including the famous Mae West model - Feather-Craft boats, Fleetwheels trailers, Frost-Craft boats, Heywood-Wakefield furniture, Kelvinator refrigerators and Murray bicycles.

 

There’s more.

 

He also designed some Mullins boats and Sabca aircraft, not to mention Yale & Towne forklifts.

 

Muzak radios? They, too, were designed by Count de Saknoffsky, as were some dresses for Natan & Co, Vollrath cookware, Pedwin shoes, even Pioneer suspenders and movie sets for Hal Roach.

 

He wasn’t quite finished with car design, as proven in the Steelcraft pedal cars.

 

He also designed the famous Labatt's beer trucks that delivered the Ontario brewer's beverages across Canada from the mid-1930s into the mid-1950s.

 

De Sakhnoffsky became a US citizen in 1939.

 

By then WWII was raging and from 1943 to 1945, he served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Air Corps, stationed in Moscow, where his multilingual fluency proved useful.

 

Although his Army pension and work for Esquire provided a steady, albeit small income after the war, he discovered that opportunities for freelance automobile designers were non-existent and took a position with his protégé, Brooks Stevens.

 

He augmented his income with illustrations for advertising agencies and an occasional design project for small manufacturers and wealthy individuals.

 

After parting ways with Stevens, he moved to Atlanta with his third wife, Joan, passing away there at the age of 62 on April 29, 1964.

 

He was awarded 38 US patents during his lifetime.

 

No other designer worked on as many car models and such a variety of other products as the super-productive Count Alexis Wladimirovich de Sakhnoffsky.

 

An article by Madelin Blitzstein in Everyweek Magazine in the mid-1930s sums him up nicely:

 

"Since the Great God of our modern era is speed and ever greater speed, the result on every hand is what we call streamlining.

 

“Look at our most rapid automobiles, our swiftest trains, our most mercurial aeroplanes, our fleetest motorboats.

 

“But when we face ourselves in the mirror or look at each other, what do we find?

 

"The same old-fashioned body, head and limbs, the same ears that stick out like handles on a sugar bowl, the same protruding nose that offers severe wind resistance, hair, that occurs in the wrong places and interferes with the best principles of design, colouring that is often diametrically opposed to the fundamentals of artistic ornament.

 

"And now an internationally famous engineering stylist steps forward with a twinkle in his eye to present a plan for bringing the human body up-to-date on the streamline principles which he has applied with phenomenal success to a host of inanimate objects.

 

“Look as if you, too, are going places and doing things in a speedy, 1934 way - that is the advice of tall, slender, Slavic Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky.”