Mr Andrea Zagato is finding it a challenge to design some watches. “You know, I thought designing a watch would be much quicker,” he laughs. “But it’s really not. Watch design is harder than people think. There’s just such a lot of complexity to it.”

Zagato, 63, is used to working with a bigger canvas. While the three pieces for Chopard that he’s working on – inspired by the Mille Miglia classic motor race and launching later this year – are passion projects, his day job is as head of arguably the last independent automotive coachbuilder in the world. Karmann, Bertone, Pininfarina – among the world’s most famous names in automotive styling – are, as Zagato notes, all gone, bankrupt or have been acquired.

But Zagato, the Italian company originally founded as an aircraft manufacturer by his grandfather, Ugo, in 1919, and which has lent its body design nous to the likes of Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, Porsche, Bentley, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Ferrari – just about every top marque you can name – is still going strong. Any of those brands find the value of their cars, not to mention their collectability, at least doubled for carrying the rare but prestigious Zagato badge. These days, it can be found on trains and even tractors, too.

“When someone tells you that you’re the last, you certainly start to think about it,” Zagato says. “We’ve survived 100 years of the company and I can say it’s a success story. But I’ve been lucky. Luck is at least 50 per cent of success like that. Sure, you have to work hard to drive that luck in the direction you want. But if you’re born an unlucky man, there’s nothing you can do about it. And I’m a lucky guy.”

It’s luck that keeps coming. He argues that the way the car industry is shifting may well lead to a renaissance for coach-building. If, in the past, the main differentiation between carmakers was their engines, now the handful major groups snapping up all the brands are faced with the logic of standardising components and platforms.

“And that’s going to be even truer for electric cars, even if I’m skeptical about their impact,” Zagato says. “It means the conversation is going back to the aesthetics of the car, with individual models becoming more important than their brands: it makes more sense to talk about Mustang, not Ford; Cinquecento, not Fiat. That’s a good thing because most [mass-market] cars are boring. Like washing machines or laptops; take the badge from the bonnet and you can hardly tell one from the other.”

Zagato likes that idea not just because it’s his business, but because, as a born and bred Milanese, he says he’s fascinated with craft, with engineering. It was Zagato that created the first car completely developed using computer design systems; that developed the use of glues to affix a subframe to the skin; that made the first entirely carbon-fibre shell – and with the look of things. Right now, most of his money seems to go into modern art. “And that’s funny because when I was younger I was really into classical painting, but taste changes though life, right?” he says. “I think our changing taste is because we somehow want to feel young or new again.”

But it’s not just art. “Furniture, lighting, graphics, architecture, it’s all here – and you’re fully immersed in it,” Zagato says. “You can’t help but be shaped by its flow of new ideas.” He posits the theory that Italy has never established the innovation base of Germany or Japan because while those nations take a vertical approach, building on what has come before, it’s very Italian to make something remarkable, then forget it and try to make something else remarkable, but different.

“Yesterday, someone was trying to get me to buy a watch, but I’m very particular about the aesthetic and if I don’t like even the smallest aspect, I won’t buy,” Zagato says. He says he only occasionally wears his first watch, his grandfather’s steel Rolex, because it has sentimental value. “I think at my age watches offer a kind of reassurance. When the future is unpredictable a watch can have a positive impact on your spirit. It’s not showing off. It’s the comfort of beautiful things. That’s something you don’t understand when you’re 18.”

But, of course, it has to be the right watch – a Zagato kind of watch. “As with cars, so with watches – good design is, for me, rational. It’s Bauhaus. It’s the Ulm School,” Zagato says. “It doesn’t need an explanation. If you have to explain a design in most cases that means it’s not a good one. There is an essential beauty – just take away everything that’s not necessary. What’s left is the best possible design.”