Revel In The Artistry Of Rolls-Royce's Most Jaw-Dropping Bespoke Cars From 2023

We’re starting off strong with the “Pearl Cullinan,” which was commissioned by a son as a present for his father’s 90th birthday and is the first Bespoke car from Rolls’ new Private Office Dubai. The custom Pearl Rose paint is inspired by the most prized pearl in the owner’s extensive collection, and it has both metallic and pearlescent effects. This paint went through 30 iterations to get right, including testing to ensure it will be unaffected by heat and UV rays, and the color was perfected under lamps that mimic the sun of the Middle East. It also has a hand-painted Rose Gold coachline to match the rose gold Spirit of Ecstasy and door sills.

The interior is finished with Cashmere Grey upholstery up front – where the father prefers to sit – while the rear cabin gets Ardent Red leather that is reminiscent to the materials used when pearls are presented. There’s Rose Gold embroidery throughout, and the custom fiber-optic starlight headliner depicts the night sky above the owner’s birthplace the moment he was born.

But it’s the pearl detailing where this Cullinan gets really special. The Burr Walnut rear-seat picnic tables have inlays featuring 1,351 individually selected pieces of mother-of-pearl that are intricately arranged in a traditional Arabic design. Another mother-of-pearl inlay in the wood dashboard trim has the Arabic word for “father” at its center in stainless steel, and the center dial and surround for car’s clock is also finished in mother-of-pearl. Michelle Lusby, Rolls’ bespoke lead designer for the Dubai office, says this car’s use of mother-of-pearl“was a great creative and technical challenge.”

A collaboration with groundbreaking Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen that took four years of continuous development to complete, Rolls-Royce calls the Phantom Syntopia “the most technically complex bespoke commission ever undertaken.” The name is taken from van Herpen’s 2018 couture collection that was inspired by biomimicry in nature. On the outside, the one-off Liquid Noir paint has blue, gold, magenta and purple undertones depending on the light and viewing angle. This was achieved by overlaying Rolls’ darkest solid black paint with a mirror-like color-shifting pigment in the clearcoat, which required a new technique that took more than 3,000 hours to develop. Those pigments were carefully redistributed on the hood to give it van Herpen’s signature “Weaving Water” motif that is inspired by how light hits rippling water.

Described as “a creative and technical meeting of minds,” the Syntopia’s cabin has features handcrafted by both the Rolls-Royce team and van Herpen’s couturiers in her Amsterdam atelier. The Phantom Syntopia has the most technically challenging version of the starlight headliner that Rolls has ever created. Created using a single piece of flawless leather, which was chosen from more than 1,000 hides, has symmetrical cuts that reveal van Herpen’s “liquid metal” woven nylon fabric underneath.

Some of van Herpen’s team traveled to Goodwood to apply 162 glass organza petals to the headliner, which took almost 300 hours. Out of the 995 stars in the headliner, 187 of them are placed alongside the artwork and illuminate sequentially from back to front. In total, the headliner alone took nearly 700 hours of collective work.

Every new Phantom has what Rolls-Royce calls the “Gallery” at the top of the dashboard. As the name implies, it’s a glass-faced sealed compartment into which customers can commission all manner of artwork, from sculptures to paintings and everything in between. For the Syntopia, van Herpen’s artists spent 60 hours applying another 85 petals by hand for the Gallery piece.

The fascia below the Gallery and the picnic tables also has Weaving Water artwork that was made by combining multiple coats of paint and lacquer that have different amounts of glass particles; the surface was first covered in black paint with 0.9% particles, then a clear coat with 1.4% particles was applied. It took four months to perfect the formula and three weeks to complete, and nine trials were done before choosing the ideal amount of glass particles: the entire car uses exactly one tablespoon.

The Syntopia harks back to the times where chauffeurs were widespread and the driver’s seat was made from hardwearing leather while the rear seats used luxurious fabrics. Up front, the Syntopia has Magic Grey leather with a lustrous finish, but the rear compartment uses a spectacularly sparkly silk-blend fabric that was created just for this car. Its pattern is inspired by how light reflects on water at night, and the seats are quilted with the Weaving Water technique. Similar to how embroidery is applied to the back of a textile to create tufting on fine furniture, this gives the seats three-dimensional depth while maintaining a smooth surface.

The Syntopia is the first Rolls-Royce to have a bespoke scent, developed for the clients by an expert perfumer that’s now known as “the Nose of the Bespoke Collective.” A specially created and patented mechanism within the headrests was developed to release the fragrance and ensure it is released delicately and will be long-lasting. The scent is described as having a cedarwood base, which was sourced from the clients’ home area, with hints of Iris, leather, Patagonia rose and lemon.

The owners of the Syntopia will also receive a one-off garment designed by van Herpen that matches the Weaving Water theme. The piece will use the same elements as the car, like the liquid metal fabric and glass organza petals, laser-cut and hand-stitched in a way that looks like undulating waves. It will take six months total to create the dress.

Did you know that Rolls-Royce grows its own roses at its Goodwood headquarters? The Phantom Rose is bred exclusively for the brand, and this one-off Rose Blossom Phantom is inspired by the flower. Colorful embroidered roses are found in the Gallery, and all of the wood marquetry has hand-installed rose inlays.

The headliner has more embroidered roses, which took more than 200 hours to complete.

Look closely enough at the embroidery throughout the cabin and you’ll see four different species of butterfly among the flowers: Common Blue, Duke of Burgundy, Peacock and Swallowtail.

Rolls-Royce is making 25 of the Ghost Ékleipsis, which is inspired by “the drama, spectacle and mystery” of the solar eclipse. The Lyrical Copper paint becomes brightly iridescent when light hits it, and the exterior has Mandarin orange accents that Rolls says is like “the intense pulses of sunlight witnessed as the eclipse progresses.” The Mandarin coachline has an abstract design that represents the darkness brought by the moon obscuring the sun.

The seats were created in Mandarin leather upholstery that was tinted black; Rolls’ artists then created more than 200,000 individual perforations in the leather to reveal the orange underneath. Rolls says this pattern was dreamt up using computation design tools and then refined over seven different iterations, to perfectly capture the feeling of the 360-degree sunset illusion that happens during an eclipse.

The dashboard fascia has 1,846 laser-etched stars that show the timeline of a total eclipse; one designer alone was tasked with individually positioning and sizing each each star, and the whole process took more than 100 hours. For the first time in company history, Rolls fitted a gemstone in the dashboard clock’s bezel – the brilliant-cut 0.5-carat diamond is positioned at the clock’s edge, representing the “diamond ring effect” when a single point of light is visible on the moon’s outline before it totally obscures the sun. The diamond assembly required rigorous testing, and it took more than 14 design iterations to get right.

Most impressive is the starlight headliner, which appears at first like one of the “regular” starlight headliners. When the doors close and the engine starts, the stars darken and an animation sequence begins, reenacting the motion and movement of a solar eclipse. A circle of 940 stars is created, like the corona of light that forms around the moon’s silhouette, and it’s surrounded by 192 additional illuminated stars like the ones in the daytime sky that are only viewable during an eclipse.

The animation lasts 7 minutes and 31 seconds – the maximum possible length of a real-life eclipse – and then the headliner reverts back to the standard star pattern. Rolls-Royce says the Ékleipsis’ headliner took a year to develop, and the Bespoke team had to produce three physical prototypes to get it right.

Another car themed around our wonderful planet’s sky, Rolls-Royce is building 62 units of the Cullinan Blue Shadow. It’s inspired by the Kármán line, the point 62 miles above the Earth’s surface where the atmosphere ends and space begins. The Stardust Blue paint is new, and the grille surround and other exterior trim pieces are in a satin finish that echoes the Space Shuttle’s heat shields. The Spirit of Ecstasy is 3D printed out of titanium and features a blue lacquer that adds color while still showing the metal’s texture.

The fascia and door panels are made up of six layers of paint to represent the transition from sky to space – five different blues and a deep black to create a 3D effect – plus a clearcoat finish that has blue and clear glass particles in it. (Rolls-Royce says even the ratio was precisely chosen: exactly 0.05%) The clock is unique to the Blue Shadow, too.

The black leather seats feature Rolls-Royce’s first custom perforation, which is designed to look like Earth as viewed from space. Two different sizes of perforations are used (0.8mm and 1.2mm), with the larger representing the sea and the smaller representing land, while the blank spaces in between represent the clouds. It took two weeks to design the pattern to make sure the design aligned throughout the entire cabin, and each seat has more than 75,000 perforations that were placed by hand. The backs of the picnic tables are also perforated, and the tables have a sparkling glass finish.

As you might expect by now, the Blue Shadow also has a spectacular headliner. The front has an embroidered depiction of the moon, using five different colors of thread and multiple techniques to create the three-dimensional craters and surface. The moon embroidery is made of 250,000 separate stitches and takes two days to complete. Surrounding the moon are 1,183 stars – 799 white ones and 384 blue ones – and Rolls-Royce upped the intensity of the star’s twinkling effect.

This one-off Phantom is a celebration of the Cinque Terre region of Italy, a coastal area in the northwest of the country that’s known for its wineries. The Ligurian Blue paint is accented with a double coachline in Jasmine and Navy Blue that has a hand-painted grape motif.

Step into the back seats and you’re greeted by grape-branch embroidery on the rear doors, with each side having 9,215 individual stitches. The grapes are made with stain stitch, the threads being aligned to match the angle that light hits the surface to give them a life-like appearance, while the leaves are created with a flatter tatami stitch. The picnic tables also have grape inlays made with gold and stainless steel.

The starlight headliner has an embroidered map of Italy at its center, created with 14,338 individual stitches. It took multiple iterations to figure out the best line weight for the embroidery – thin enough so the outline shows every minute detail of Italy, but wide enough so the thread can shimmer – and it took more than a month to finalize. Five stars along the coastline are positioned at the locations of the five different cliffside villages of the region.

The Phantom’s dashboard Gallery features a specially commissioned piece of art that represents the five villages. It was first sketched digitally, then airbrushed by hand with water-based acrylic paint and covered in coats of clear lacquer. Rolls says the artwork was positioned so it’s viewable from all occupants of the car. Inside the glove compartment you’ll find a silver panel with the villages debossed into it.

This pink Ghost was commissioned for an influencer client whose online persona is @champagnerose, and the paint was created to match her signature color. The leather is also pink, and the single-tone Champagne Rose paint is found on the interior trim as well. Rolls says getting the color right for both exterior and interior applications is “exceptionally complex,” as your eyes see slight variations even if the color is exactly the same throughout, so multiple formulations of the paint were developed for the different uses.

Another one-off, this Ghost was commissioned by the brand’s Manchester dealership, celebrating the city in which Charles Rolls and Henry Royce first met in the Midland Hotel on May 4 1904 and agreed to build cars together. The Silver paint is accented by bright teal Turchese coachlines and accents, and a design inspired by the Manchester Bee symbol is found on the D-pillar.

Locations of different Manchester landmarks are embroidered into the rear seat center, and each seat has Turchese accents with both tone-on-tone and colored embroidered bees. Graphene was first isolated in Manchester, so the headliner has a lattice pattern inspired by the material.

The illuminated dashboard fascia is comprised of 10,000 laser-etched dots that create “an ethereal view” of Manchester from the sky. The largest of the dots is placed in the location of the Midland Hotel, and the inscription in the fascia is a reference to Tony Walsh’s poem “This is the Place,” which is a tribute to Manchester.

The Wraith coupe ended production this year, so Rolls-Royce created 12 of this Black Arrow special edition to celebrate its last V12-powered coupe ever. Its design is inspired by the Thunderbolt, a land-speed record car from the 1930s that used Rolls-Royce V12 airplane engines. The Black Arrow is the first time Rolls has used gradient exterior paint, with the finish starting with Celebration Silver and transitioning to Black Diamond, the latter of which has a glass-infused layer on top. The high-gloss lacquer required over 12 hours of polishing to get right, giving the paint a texture that recalls the surface of the Bonneville Salt Flats. Rolls’ Bespoke designers and engineers spent 18 months developing and testing the gradient paint, which the company says is one of the most complex paints it has ever created. Bright Yellow accents on the exterior throw back to the Thunderbolt’s livery, and the painted V-struts behind the grille are another Rolls first.

The dashboard fascia is made from a single sheet of black-coated aluminum; engraved into it is an exploded view of the V12 engine, with the engraving technique revealing the bright finish behind. A polished aluminum speedform model of the Thunderbolt is preserved under glass in the center console, and the starlight headliner has 2,117 stars – the most ever – that depict the Milky Way and the stars over the Salt Flats on the date of the Thunderbolt’s final record in 1938.

Rolls-Royce used a new Club leather finish for the armrests, door panels, dashboard trim and other pieces that has a brighter sheen and deeper colors than the typical natural-grain leather of the seats. This finish also emphasizes the leather’s natural markings. The huge door panels have open-pore black wood that uses 320 lasered marquetry pieces that mimic the Salt Flat surface.