When Charles Rolls and Henry Royce founded their luxury car company in 1906, the intention was clear: “Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.”
For Rolls-Royce’s current design director, Giles Taylor, better can include anything from diamond-encrusted dashboards and built-in picnic hampers, to cigar humidors and a custom-created leather interior that matches a favourite designer handbag. No client request is too outlandish – as long as they can afford it, and the performance of the car isn’t compromised.
Rolls-Royce bespoke is booming. The German-owned, United Kingdom-based company achieved record sales last year with the delivery of 3,785 bespoke cars, and it is estimated that 85 per cent of all Rolls-Royce motor cars sold around the world are now commissioned with some level of bespoke features. It takes roughly 60 pairs of hands about 400 hours to create a Rolls-Royce, although it can take a lot longer for a heavily bespoke commission.
Taylor’s latest project has more of an artistic slant; he and his team have collaborated with contemporary Emirati artist and photographer Mohammed Kazem. As part of Rolls-Royce’s ongoing Art Programme, Dubai-based Kazem has worked with Rolls-Royce’s bespoke department to create a unique Wraith motor car, as well as a bespoke sculpture for the carmaker’s iconic marque.
“With the Mohammed Kazem Wraith, we really exploited the incredible depth of detail, only achievable when executing a vision with the hands of skilled craftspeople,” says Taylor.
Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem. Courtesy Rolls-Royce
Kazem is part of the so-called “Five”, an informal group of Emirati artists that includes Abdullah Al Saadi, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, and brothers Hassan and Hussain Sharif. This project is a change in gear for Kazem, an artist whose work usually focuses on presenting transient phenomena, such as sound and light, in tangible terms.
But Kazem’s fascination with collecting and chronicling information, by photographing and mapping latitude and longitude co-ordinates, is evident in the car’s final design. For the artist, documenting his surroundings has been an obsession since childhood. “I remember that while walking to and from school, I would often find discarded objects on the street. They fascinated me, and I began to collect domestic detritus,” he says. “Now, years later, I am still fascinated by collecting and documenting information, and tracing our present within a particular environment.”
Inspired by the craftspeople who work to create each Rolls-Royce car, Kazem mapped out the localities of each of the artisans from around the United Kingdom. These GPS co-ordinates became a recurring abstract motif in his design.
There is a rich tradition of art cars in history. In 1925, Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delaunay used a Citroën B12 instead of a traditional canvas to express her inimitable geometric style. In 1975, American sculptor Alexander Calder created an art car with BMW, daubed with his signature abstract approach in primary colours of red and yellow. Japanese artist and writer Yayoi Kusama has a penchant for covering cars in her trademark polka dots, as did American artist and social activist Keith Haring. But with Kazem’s design, the level of detail is mind-boggling. The Wraith, which has a black and cobalt-blue exterior, boasts a one-of-a-kind “Starlight Headliner” motif, the product of nearly 90 hours of painstaking work. More than 1,300 individual fibre-optic threads were placed by hand, while more than 60,000 individual hand-stitches make up the embroidery finishing in the interior.
The interior is created from fibre-optic threads and individual hand-stitched embroidery. Courtesy Rolls-Royce
Kazem’s creative approach reflects the wider Rolls-Royce bespoke process. According to Taylor, clients approach buying a Rolls-Royce in the same way they would approach acquiring a piece of art, and bespoke commissions increasingly take on a significance beyond getting customers from A to B. “The idea is to create a result that is so much more than the sum of its parts and has an engaging story. We increasingly see our patrons seeking to express personal, family or even cultural stories through their commissions,” Taylor explains. “Often, it can start with a simple inspiration; a colour, piece of art, sculpture or even a significant event in the patron’s life.”
Taylor adds that while the United States is the fastest-growing market, the Middle East remains the biggest and the most daring. “Some of our boldest, most individual creations have been commissioned by patrons of luxury in the region.”
He believes this reflects a shift in the luxury industry, away from status symbols to something a little more cerebral, which transcends simply being a material possession. “Our clients have reached a stage in life where they want to curate, commission and collect, and therefore seek to work in consort with luxury houses that can deliver exquisitely made pieces that express their individual vision,” says Taylor.
A customer can expect their bespoke Rolls-Royce to be ready within six to 12 months, but Taylor says that it is rare for a client not to take an active role in the design process. “Many patrons visit the Global Centre of Excellence in Goodwood [in the UK] to meet the artisans,” he says. Others invite the design team to their homes, or on yachts or jets, to provide a sense of their aesthetic preferences. “We are seeing an increasing number of patrons taking a real interest in the minutiae of the process.”
In 2016, Rolls-Royce launched a brand-new commissioning suite to meet the requirements of its exacting clients through a series of one-to-one consultations. “Many will visit us here at the home of Rolls-Royce multiple times to watch the artisans tasked with bringing their vision to life,” he says.
No detail is overlooked: even the lighting can imitate the particular shade of daylight at different times of the day in almost every country of the world, so that customers can understand how their chosen paint colour – there are 44,000 options – will look across a 24-hour period.
What is fascinating about Rolls-Royce’s bespoke team is that artisans are drawn from diverse and unconventional backgrounds. This, Taylor argues, is what sets the company apart from mass luxury brands. “I fundamentally believe in cultivating skills within the team that extend far beyond the automotive spectrum,” says Taylor. “You are more likely to find someone who began their career building superyachts or crafting bespoke furniture than someone with roots in the car industry.”
The recently unveiled Rolls-Royce Dawn takes its cue from the world of haute couture, for example. For its design, Taylor enlisted the talents of textile-arts graduates Cherica Haye and Michelle Lusby to transform the interior. Haye and Lusby also worked on the Serenity Phantom, which was showcased at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show. The detailed petal-by-petal, hand-painted, crimson blossoms on the silk interior took up to 600 hours of work per panel. Celestial, another bespoke Phantom project, was designed to evoke the night sky. Created in 2013, it features an interior studded with 446 diamonds, with fibre-optic stars on the roof that replicate the sky over the Goodwood factory. The car was purchased by a mystery buyer as a birthday present to himself for a rumoured US$1.5 million (Dh5.5m).
The Wraith has a black and cobalt-blue exterior. Courtesy Rolls-Royce
Kazem’s Wraith is on display at the Rolls-Royce showroom in Abu Dhabi this month, and it has reportedly already been sold to a customer from the Middle East. And for the artist, the Wraith is not just a mode of transportation. “With purchasing the car, I believe the future owner is truly investing in a work of art that is an interpretation of true luxury.”
Read this and more stories in Luxury magazine, out with The National on Thursday, May 11.
