FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW: Rolls gets personal

Having launched its Wraith coupe mid-year, Rolls-Royce is using its stand at the Frankfurt show to exhibit the skills of the craftspeople from its Bespoke division.

Long crucial to the marque’s brand equity but overlooked during its low period of the late 20th century, Bespoke plays a big part in current owner BMW’s strategy to differentiate the brand.

The highlight of the company’s display at the show is the Celestial Phantom, a one-off LWB example of Goodwood’s flagship saloon aimed at showcasing the extent to which buyers can individualise their cars.

Inspired by the completion and handover of the first new-generation Phantom at midnight on New Year’s Eve 2003, the car shows the hand of the marque’s Bespoke services division inside and out.

The near-black exterior paintwork “evokes the night sky”, the company says, with the incorporation of fine glass particles into the paint “to achieve an alluring sense of depth and light”. The wheel-hub centres feature unique engravings, while the Spirit of Ecstasy gets ethereal uplighting.

Inside, ‘dusk’-hued upholstery enhances the nocturnal feel, while the 1000 fibre-optic lights of the “starlight headliner”, one of the brand’s more popular bespoke options, have been hand-woven into the roof lining to emulate the constellations “exactly as they were at midnight on that historic evening”. They even had it verified for authenticity at the South Downs Planetarium in nearby Chichester.

A bespoke picnic set featuring hand-engraved Celestial motif glassware and specially commissioned Nymphenburg porcelain plates brings the Rolls-Royce ambience to any truck stop.

“This highly Bespoke luxury motor car is the perfect way for us to celebrate our first decade of production at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, England. The peerless design and craftsmanship employed in creating these one-of-a-kind masterpieces ensures the marque’s rightful place as purveyor of the very finest luxury goods in the world,” Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös said of the car.

Alongside the Celestial Phantom is a special-edition ‘Home of Rolls-Royce’ Ghost. It features an eight-pointed ‘Celebration’ compass motif marquetry inlay on the front-fascia, the product of a painstaking process involving the hand-assembly of laser-cut pieces of wood into a decorative inlay.

Elsewhere, the motif has been embroidered into the armrests and the centre box lid on the console, “… [expressing] the Home of Rolls-Royce’s position as a major global center of super-luxury manufacturing excellence”.

Made up of 120,000 stitches, the pattern is complex enough to take more than an hour for each example to be completed using Rolls’ precision embroidery technology.

The car also features co-ordinates engraved into the Spirit of Ecstasy’s bezel, the tread plates and the handles of the umbrellas that come with the car.

The highlight of the exterior bodywork is a hand-painted coachline finishing in a half-compass motif – the product of what the company says is a 22-stage painting process taking a week, with a single craftsman hand-painting the coachlines with precision-made squirrel hair-brushes. The bespoke design and finish on this car took twice the normal time to complete.

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