► CAR visits RR’s London showroom► We act as a future client…
► …and build our own Rolls-Royce Ghost
It’s been a year since Rolls-Royce set up its relocated flagship London showroom in the heart of Mayfair. Based on Berkeley Street, the showroom is just a stone’s throw away from the birthplace of Charles Rolls on Hill Street, and it caters to the exclusive clientele looking for a new Pantheon-grilled luxury car to call their own.
Like many car makers, Rolls-Royce wants to do more with its showroom, creating a space for clients to spend time and relax, as well as getting to work crafting their new Rolls-Royce and visiting the London base to hand over their new car.
But, while the showroom is open to the public, only The One Per Cent would ever get the chance to experience it in full. So, CAR was invited to the showroom to see the process of designing a new Rolls-Royce from scratch.
What’s it like inside the showroom?
As you’d expect, Rolls-Royce has paid incredible attention to detail. Alongside the showroom’s physical placement in London being close to key locations of the brand’s founding fathers, the doors into the building are designed to look like the Pantheon grille.
Rolls-Royce says the London showroom has taken significant design inspiration from the one in Shanghai. It’s clean, with a lot of white marble used inside and large screens. At the time of our visit, the screens were displaying the brand’s first NFT collaboration and the testing programme of the new, all-electric Spectre due in 2023. As well as show cars available for you to poke around – when we visited, there was a Cullinan, Wraith, Ghost Black Badge and Phantom on display – there’s a ‘speakeasy’ bar area for clients to chill out, a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ that included books, wood veneer cuts and other bits and bobs designed to ‘spark ideas.’
Of course, the main part of the showroom is the atelier room. This is where you get to design your own car, and where clients come for vehicle handovers, where Rolls-Royce gifts the client flowers, a bottle of champagne and an individually commissioned artwork of their new car to take home.
The atelier room is dominated by a large central table allowing clients to pull out paint colour swatches and rolls of leather, and allows clients get up close to details like the brand’s Starlight Headliner. Quotes from the founders are dotted around the walls, and you can even see examples of the Phantom’s ‘gallery’ front panel.
Every one of the cars Rolls-Royce builds is designed to be one-off creations – there’s no such thing as an ‘off the rack’ Roller, even if the brand’s showrooms may have cars in stock to buy instantly, they’re always designed from the ground up.
And ‘no’ isn’t really an answer. Clients can bring in materials, colours, images or their own inspiration to get a feel for the colour palette, upholstery choices and bespoke elements they want in their own car and Rolls-Royce will do its best to incorporate it. Elliott Trousdale, sales executive at Rolls-Royce London and our guide through the process of building our own car, told us he’s had commissions incorporating all the colours of the Sri Lankan flag, for example. A Cullinan was designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Arab Emirates, which was all white save for a coachline with red and green detailing and a big ’50th’ motive painted onto the bodywork.
The process in the atelier is usually reserved to an initial hour-long appointment, with the ability to return at a time in the future to refine the details. ‘It’s this part, the interior and exterior colours, that takes the most time,’ Elliott tells us, ‘it’ll be 50 minutes out of the hour appointment.’
So, what did you end up building?
Well, given it’s the most recent of Rolls-Royce’s models, it seemed fitting to try designing a new Ghost Black Badge. In terms of actually designing the car, it’s all down to a computer program displayed on a large screen, allowing you to visualise it as clear as possible. It’s basically a highly-detailed configurator – not exactly an innovation these days when it comes to buying a new car – but, here, Rolls-Royce can display your new creation in different settings and lighting scenarios and create a highly detailed digital brochure with videos and high-resolution images.
My aim is to build a car that I can drive *and* be driven in. Given the slightly sportier nature of the Black Badge branding – a variant that now comprises around 30 per cent of Rolls-Royce’s yearly sales – and the implications that the name suggests, certain elements are set in stone. The Pantheon grille and Spirit of Ecstasy, for example, are a darker chrome than your average Ghost, and the wheel design is set to the one you see pictured. Inside, wood veneers are replaced by carbonfibre panelling.
So, in keeping with that dark theme, I wanted to keep the colours dark, too. Splitting the palette in two, the main colour is sapphire black (a deep navy blue) topped with gunmetal (a highly metallic grey). Something that was introduced with the Black Badge variants included the ability to paint details like the brake calipers in a specific colour, too. So, as suggested by Elliott to bring a flash of brightness, the brakes and coachline are in Forge Yellow, a colour Elliott has ‘really come to love’ recently. I like it, too.
Inside, I wanted to continue the tri-colour theme, but flipped the grey and navy blue around so the grey was much more in the forefront. Yellow piping and stitching gives the interior a bit of extra oomph and the black dashboard panel is illuminated
I also couldn’t resist specifying the Starlight Headliner – a real party piece for Rolls-Royce. Elliott tells us it’s as customisable as any other big element, too. ‘With Starlight, you can have your initials marked out, or your signature or a company logo – our clients would send us a design and we’d do it through the factory,’ he says. And you can even have shooting stars included in the design; ‘at the factory, they set tracks through the starlight, and you can set the shooting stars to be blue, green, yellow… and so on.’
Then it gets down to the minutiae. Monogrammed headrest stitching, pressed Spirit of Ecstasy motifs in the doors and customised, illuminated treadplates. I’m told that Rolls-Royce Cars CEO, Torsten Müller-Ötvös, has ‘CEO’ on his plates. ‘I have sold his cars later down the line and we give the option to take those treadplates off or keep them on,’ adds Elliott, ‘because of what it is and the provenance of that car, it makes it massively desirable.’
Come on then, how much is yours?
Ah yes, the big question. Well, Ghost Black Badges start at £325k. Mine, with all of the toys and customised details, would set non-existent-wealthy-me back £439,810. Yowzers.
‘Just under £440,000!’ says Elliott, ‘for reference, the car we have in the window is comes in at £427k, so you’ve outdone that! It would be a stunning car, though, we’re big fans of all of those colours.’ So much so that Elliott has even pondered commissioning the design as a car in stock. So, who knows? Maybe someone might be rolling around in a Ghost Black Badge that CAR designed.
How would you build your dream Roller? Tell us how you would build one in the comments.
Keyword: Millionnaire for a day: what’s it like to be a Rolls-Royce customer?