Rallying from the brink of bankruptcy, Italy's oldest car-design company is racking up new contracts and looking to open an office in Detroit for the first time in its 98-year history.

Stile Bertone, which created landmark designs like the Lamborghini Miura and Countach, Fiat Dino, Volvo 780 and Citro en BX, is back on its feet and hungry to grow, Roland Martin, Bertone's business development director, told me recently.

"At the beginning of 2008, it looked like Stile Bertone would not survive," Martin told me as we sat a few feet from the Bertone-built BAT 11 concept car, one of the stars at the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance.

"The significance of the BAT 11 was to show people that Bertone is still alive," Martin said. The dramatic green sport coupe was inspired by Traverse City dentist Gary Kaberle, who had owned another Bertone classic, the BAT 9, for decades.

Creditors nearly turned the lights off on Bertone last winter. The design business was solvent, but a subsidiary that assembled cars for automakers hemorrhaged money, threatening to take the whole company down with it.

Told to stop work on the BAT 11 to save money, a handful of designers defied orders, finished the car and sneaked it to a brief appearance before the Geneva auto show in Switzerland in March.

The car was a hit, generating positive headlines for a company that had been mired in a soap opera of family intrigue and financial woe.

Italian courts separated Stile Bertone from the crumbling assembly business, creating a standalone design business. The Bertone family still owns it, but a professional management team runs the business.

"We are rebuilding," said Martin, who joined Bertone from fellow Italian design house Giugiaro in June. "We're opening an office in China now and we want to open them in the United States and India."

Bertone has about 20 design projects going, including work for automakers in Europe and China and designing interiors of luxury yachts, business jets and helicopters.

The biggest jobs are in China, where Bertone is taking several new passenger cars from the initial design stage all the way to building running models, Martin said.

"We don't have any projects in the United States," Martin said, although Bertone has done a lot of work for GM's Opel brand in Europe. "We want to change that. This is the biggest market for cars in the world, and it will remain so for a long time. We need a presence in Detroit to participate here," said Martin, who lived in Rochester for several years when he worked for supplier Magna.

"You have to have an office here where your clients can come and walk around models of your design proposals," he said. "We're working on it. We want this operation set up as soon as possible."

It would be a small office, with a small staff for sales, design and model-making. Bertone wants a partner to share space and costs - ideally, a company with an existing facility that does design and engineering and does not compete directly with Bertone.

The local automakers all have full design staffs, of course, but it's not unusual for outside studios to be hired to provide a fresh viewpoint.

"We are usually commissioned to do designs in competition with a company's internal studios," Martin said. "It's a creative competition."

The BAT 11 may yet play another role in Bertone's rebirth.

The company may build 25 to 50 running versions of the graceful coupe. It's part of a plan to produce very small runs of historic designs from the company's past and present.

Bertone won't risk gearing up for the production volumes of thousands of cars that got its assembly business in hock, Martin said.

"They would be custom-built vehicles, and we would only do it if we sell them before we begin production," he said.

"We're not going to build our future on speculation."