The British luxury automaker’s Phantom saloon is turning 100 years old soon, and the company chose to celebrate it with an ultra-exclusive edition capped at 25 units.
The collection is being described as “the most complex and intricately crafted” to date, taking three long years to design. The initial year went into studying the entire history of the Phantom model and looking for inspiration in its origins. The result is a vehicle where no single detail is coincidental – everything is a homage or a stylistic nod.
The exterior finish is black and white with a special kind of lacquer coat on top that incorporates glass flakes. Rolls-Royce has used similar flakes before, but they were almost always transparent, whereas the Centenary Edition uses champagne-tinted glass for an added sense of color depth. The Spirit of Ecstasy figurine was molded after the very first design of this bonnet ornament, which was coincidentally introduced 100 years ago along with the Phantom. Just like in the distant past, this one comes with a stamp of the London-based Goldsmiths’ Company.
Inside, the rear seats wear a textile upholstery adorned with a multilayer ornament – part-embroidered, part-printed using a bespoke printing technique. The motif incorporates various geographical locations that played a role in the past of the Rolls-Royce Phantom, along with images of the most famous cars and their owners. A work this extensive is akin to “hand-woven tapestry”, Rolls-Royce claims. More references can be found on the door cards with their engraved wooden trim and the Starry Sky ceiling.
An aluminum composition on the dashboard resembles pages from a book with stylized letters coming together to form quotes from early media reviews of the Phantom. Last but not least, every car comes richly decorated with gold, be it embroidery, stitching, leaf or something else. The 6.75-liter V12 under the hood has a gold-plated cover.
