Some love letters are written on paper. This one comes with a Starlight Headliner. Phantom Hummingbird is a Phantom Extended Private Commission conceived as a tribute to a client's wife and curated by Private Office Dubai. Its muse is a tiny bird that steals every scene: the hummingbird, a symbol of joy, of resilience, and of finding beauty in every moment. As briefs go, that is about as charming as it gets.

"The natural world has always been a rich source of inspiration for Rolls-Royce Bespoke commissions, offering extraordinary forms and colours for our designers and craftspeople to interpret. Our clients continually invite us to explore that inspiration in new and unexpected ways, as this remarkable Private Commission so perfectly demonstrates. The introduction of abalone shell into Rolls-Royce marquetry presented our designers and craftspeople with a fresh creative and technical challenge, resulting in an elegant tribute to the hummingbird’s mesmerising presence."Phil Fabre de la Grange, Head of Bespoke, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

A FIRST FOR THE MARQUE

Here is the headline for the craft devotees: this is the first time Rolls-Royce has worked abalone shell into its marquetry. Turn the shell over and its nacreous inner surface throws back a blue-green glow that seems to shift as you move. Paired with mother-of-pearl, it becomes plumage. That is a fitting choice, because a hummingbird's colour is not really pigment at all. It comes from microscopic structures in the feathers that split light the way a prism does, so the bird flashes a different shade with every turn of its head. Nature's own special effect has now been translated into shell and wood.

Close-up of iridescent green and violet hummingbird feathers
Hummingbird plumage, the inspiration for the commission: its iridescence comes from microscopic structures in the feathers that split light like tiny prisms, an effect echoed in abalone and mother-of-pearl. · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

COUNTING FEATHERS

The bird appears twice, once on each Picnic Table, and each one is assembled from 53 pieces of abalone and mother-of-pearl. The wings alone take 18 of them. Between the rear seats, the Rear Waterfall panel carries a botanical motif of 84 pieces, a little garden for the hummingbirds to visit.

Botanical marquetry motif on the Rear Waterfall panel between the rear seats of Phantom Hummingbird
The 84-piece botanical motif on the Rear Waterfall panel · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

THE PATIENCE OF THE HAND

None of it came quickly. The project ran for more than nine months, and abalone made the Bespoke Collective's designers, engineers and craftspeople work for every fragment. It is fine and brittle, and it does not forgive. Six iterations went by before the team settled on a method that worked. In the final approach the pearl and abalone are thinned first, so that each sliver can be seated gently but securely, and then lacquered. That way the shimmer survives the generations of ownership a Phantom is built to see.

A Rolls-Royce craftsperson placing a fragment of shell into the hummingbird marquetry with tweezers
Setting each fragment by hand · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

Then comes precision that borders on the absurd, in the best possible way. Every piece is laser-cut 0.06 mm larger than its finished size to allow for the burn margin of the laser itself, and then filed to shape by hand. Edges are worked until each one meets its neighbour with no visible seam. On the hummingbird's wings, only a human hand can achieve that fit. After cutting and fitting, each panel needed a further eight hours to complete, and the three panels came to 45 hours in total.

A craftsperson brushing lacquer over the hummingbird marquetry panel
Once every fragment is set, the marquetry is lacquered so the shimmer of the abalone lasts for generations. · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

A CABIN IN BLOOM

The woods were chosen to let the shell sing. Ash Burr veneer forms the background of all three marquetry panels. Silver Birch appears within the Picnic Table motifs, and all of it was cut from a single log that was selected and examined closely so its grain would suit the design. The seats are trimmed in Creme Light leather with Moccasin and Tan detailing. Seashell carpets lie underfoot, and a Starlight Headliner glitters overhead, so the hummingbird has a sky to fly in.

DRESSED FOR FLIGHT

Outside, the palette is pure confection: Wildberry on the lower body and White Sands on the upper. A hand-applied White Sands Coachline traces the division between the two, and a hand-painted hummingbird flies along it for the full, generous length of the Phantom Extended. It is a small flourish and a delightful one, and it suits a motor car built around the idea that beauty is often found in the smallest, brightest things.

Hand-painted White Sands hummingbird motif on the coachline of Phantom Hummingbird, Wildberry and White Sands paint
The hand-painted hummingbird on the White Sands Coachline · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

WHAT MAKES ROLLS-ROYCE CRAFTSMANSHIP UNIQUE

Phantom Hummingbird in Wildberry and White Sands outside the Home of Rolls-Royce at Goodwood
Phantom Hummingbird at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, West Sussex, where every Rolls-Royce is designed and built by hand. · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

One address, many hands

Every Rolls-Royce is designed and built by hand in one place: the Home of Rolls-Royce at Goodwood, West Sussex. The plant opened on 1 January 2003. At the time, around 300 people built a single car a day. Today more than 2,500 people work there, and the line can produce up to 28 motor cars a day. Rolls-Royce says each car takes more than 600 hours to build, and the most ambitious commissions can take up to four years to develop and complete. The best measure of all this may be longevity: around two-thirds of all Rolls-Royce motor cars ever built are still on the road. Next door, a site extension worth more than £300 million is under way to make more room for Bespoke and Coachbuild. It was declared weathertight in November 2025, and the first technologies are due to move in during 2026.

The Bespoke Collective and the Private Office

The designers, engineers and craftspeople who carry out these commissions work together as the Bespoke Collective. The original Private Office is at Goodwood, where clients sit down with a designer to shape their motor car. Since 2022 the idea has travelled. Dubai opened in July 2022 as the first Private Office outside Goodwood, Shanghai followed in 2023, and New York and Seoul opened in 2024. Each office works by invitation or appointment, with a designer and a client experience manager based in the region. Rolls-Royce says Private Office commissions are typically about 25% higher in value. In 2025, the first full year with all five offices open, commissions through them more than doubled. Phantom Hummingbird is one of them, curated by Private Office Dubai.

A line drawn by hand

The coachline is the fine stripe that runs the length of the body, and it is painted freehand with a brush made from natural materials. Rolls-Royce sets the width at 3 mm on Phantom, Cullinan and Ghost and 4 mm on Spectre, to suit that car's proportions. Since the early years of the Goodwood era, the hand on the brush has belonged to Mark Court, the coachline artisan pictured at work in Rolls-Royce's own PressClub archive. Press profiles have long described the job as his alone. He works with squirrel-hair brushes that he trims to shape himself. Today Rolls-Royce describes a skilled team of artisans applying coachlines and motifs. A motif can be added to the line: a flower, a family crest, a paw print or, on this Phantom, a hummingbird in flight.

A sky in the roof

The Starlight Headliner began as one client's request. He suffered from photophobia, an extreme sensitivity to light, and could only read comfortably under the night sky on his ranch. In 2006 he took delivery of a Phantom with 800 'stars' in its roof. Today a headliner carries between 800 and 1,600 fibre-optic points, each one set by hand at its own depth and angle so the sky seems to twinkle. A standard pattern takes about nine hours. A personal constellation, such as the sky above a particular place on an anniversary, can take more than 17. In 2025 an in-house artist went further for Cullinan Cosmos, creating Rolls-Royce's first fully hand-painted Starlight Headliner in 20 layers of paint over 160 hours.

Wood, leather and the art of marquetry

The department once called the Woodshop is now the Interior Surface Centre. Every veneer in a single car comes from the same tree, so the grain becomes that car's own fingerprint and all of its wood ages together. Veneers rest for at least three days in a humidor held at 23°C and 75% humidity. Royal Walnut is then matched in a chevron at exactly 55 degrees, and Burr Walnut is book-matched like a mirror. Lacquer goes on in layers 0.3 mm thick before being polished to a deep shine. Marquetry and parquetry commissions have ranged from more than 320 hand-placed pieces to a cascade of falling rose petals made from 1,603 pieces of wood. The Hummingbird's abalone is the newest material in that tradition.

In the Interior Trim Centre, every hide is inspected by eye under high-intensity light. Flaws are marked in chalk and cut around, and each leather part is skived from about 1.5 mm to 0.6 mm so its seams sit small and neat. Outside, clients can choose from 44,000 colours, and if none is right, Rolls-Royce will develop a new one and reserve it for that client alone. Each car is then hand-polished for four hours to reach its signature piano finish.

The lady on the bonnet

The Spirit of Ecstasy was sculpted by the artist Charles Robinson Sykes and registered as Rolls-Royce property in 1911. Eleanor Thornton, his muse, is widely held to be her model, though Rolls-Royce happily admits that some mystery remains. In 1920 she won Sykes the gold medal at a Paris contest to find the finest motor car mascot of the day. She is still made by lost-wax casting, a technique more than 5,000 years old, and is offered in solid silver, 24-carat gold plate or black carbon fibre. On every car built at Goodwood she rises gracefully from the grille and retreats out of harm's way at the slightest touch.

The Spirit of Ecstasy on Phantom Hummingbird
The Spirit of Ecstasy rises from the bonnet of Phantom Hummingbird. Sculpted by Charles Robinson Sykes, she has been a Rolls-Royce emblem since 1911. · Courtesy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

Coachbuild: the body itself

Beyond Bespoke lies Coachbuild, where client and marque design the shape of the car together. The modern Coachbuild story runs from Sweptail to Boat Tail and on to Droptail. Boat Tail arrived in 2021 as three commissions sharing one body, each with its own colours and details, and it made its public debut at the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este. In 2023 came Droptail, the first true two-seater roadster from Rolls-Royce in more than half a century. Only four will be built, among them Arcadia Droptail, which was revealed in 2024.

WHO BUYS A ROLLS-ROYCE

Younger than you might think. When Rolls-Royce refreshed its brand identity in 2020, it said the average age of its clients had fallen to just 43, and it credited that partly to Black Badge, the marque's darker and more assertive alter ego. By 2021, Black Badge cars accounted for 27% of commissions worldwide. Every car built at Goodwood carries some element of Bespoke, so in a real sense every owner is a commissioning client.

The numbers tell the rest of the story. In 2023 Rolls-Royce delivered 6,032 motor cars across more than 50 countries, the most in its history to that point. The total for 2024 was 5,712, its third-best year, and also a record year for Bespoke: the Bespoke content value per car rose 10% on average. In 2025 the marque created 5,664 motor cars. Cullinan was the most requested model and Spectre came second, and the year was the strongest ever in Asia-Pacific. Here is the picture region by region, using only what Rolls-Royce and reputable press have published.

THE ARTISTS

Behind every Rolls-Royce is a roll call of named hands and minds. Here are the ones the marque itself has put forward.

WHERE TO SEE THEM

Rolls-Royce no longer runs public factory tours at Goodwood, and its Private Offices welcome guests by invitation or appointment only. The showrooms below are on the marque's official dealer network, and each listing links to its official page. It is wise to book ahead.

  1. Home of Rolls-Royce & Private Office Goodwood Chichester, England
    The Drive, Westhampnett, Chichester, West Sussex PO18 0SH, United Kingdom (no public tours; Private Office by invitation)
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/en_GB/home.html
  2. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars London London (Mayfair), England
    50 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8HD, United Kingdom
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/london/en_GB/showroom.html
  3. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Porto Porto, Portugal
    Centro Empresarial da Circunvalação, n.º 9309 a 9543, 4250-148 Porto, Portugal (listed by Rolls-Royce as ownership services)
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/porto/en_GB/ownership-services.html
  4. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Manhattan New York, USA
    270 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA (Private Office New York, by appointment, is in the Meatpacking District)
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/manhattan/en_US/showroom.html
  5. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil
    Av. Pedroso de Morais, 2274, Pinheiros, 05420-003 São Paulo SP, Brazil
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/saopaolo/en_GB/showroom.html
  6. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Dubai Dubai, UAE
    Sheikh Zayed Road, PO Box 8827, Dubai, UAE (Private Office Dubai: The Offices 4, One Central, by appointment via the dealer)
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/dubai/en_GB/showroom.html
  7. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Johannesburg Johannesburg, South Africa
    1 Whiteley Road, Melrose, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/johannesburg/en_GB/showroom.html
  8. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Shanghai Pudong Shanghai, China
    No. 7-2 Jimo Road, Shangyue Bay, Lujiazui Binjiang Financial City, Pudong, Shanghai 200120 (Private Office Shanghai opened in 2023; address not published)
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com.cn/shanghai-pudong/zh_CN/showroom.html
  9. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Seoul, Cheongdam Boutique Seoul, South Korea
    419 Dosan-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul (Private Office Seoul, by appointment, is in Jamsil)
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/seoul/en_GB/showroom.html
  10. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Tokyo Tokyo, Japan
    4-1 Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0094, Japan
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/tokyo/en_GB/showroom.html
  11. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Singapore Singapore
    11 Kung Chong Road, Singapore 159147
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/singapore/en_GB/showroom.html
  12. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Sydney Sydney, Australia
    75-85 O'Riordan Street, Alexandria NSW 2015, Australia
    www.rolls-roycemotorcars.com/sydney/en_GB/showroom.html

WITH THANKS

LIKE® Magazine extends its warmest thanks to Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and the Rolls-Royce PressClub for their long and enduring friendship with LIKE® Magazine. Over the years, theirs has been a partnership of rare generosity and grace, and we look forward to telling many more of these stories together.

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