► Rolls-Royce Serenity - The Ultimate Phantom

Rolls-Royce has brought Serenity to this year’s Geneva International Motor Show, unveiling the new standard in authentic, bespoke luxury motoring to the world’s media.
The choice of Phantom Extended Wheelbase for this project was obvious, but creating the motif that would define this most opulent and modern of automotive interiors would require considerable new expertise.
As with the creation of every Rolls-Royce, the genesis of Serenity and its blossom motif began with a blank piece of paper. However, unlike any other Rolls-Royce, it also began with a blank bolt of the finest hand-woven silk.
In order to create this totally one-off bolt of silk for Serenity, the Bespoke team looked to Suzhou, China, the town renowned for its creation of imperial embroidery. The team sourced the unspun silk thread and had it hand-dyed by the Chinese craftspeople who have been creating beautiful silks for centuries.
It was then transported to one of Britain’s oldest mills, based in Essex, to be hand-woven into just 10 metres of the fabric – enough to clothe the interior of Serenity – in a process that took two days or two hours per meter of fabric. The numerous colours of silk thread were painstakingly blended into the highest quality warp which has 140 threads per centimetre to result in the lustrous Smoke Green colour of the underlying silk fabric.
Once prepared, the plain Smoke Green silk was transferred to London where the blossom motif designed by Haye and Lusby – a uniquely modern take on centuries-old silk Chinoiserie – began to flourish across the fabric as British and Chinese craftspeople embroidered their vision of copper-coloured branches and white petals.
The final touch was the detailed petal by petal hand-painting of crimson blossoms directly onto the silk. The resulting panels and swatches that have formed the centrepiece of Serenity would take up to 600 hours of work per panel.
The style of painting employed in the design of the Serenity silk is a centuries-old technique known as 'unconscious painting'. Much of Japanese painting technique is learned through very fine and detailed rendering of classical forms within nature; branches, leaves, flowers, bamboo etc.
The work can be painstaking with the same form rendered again and again. The purpose of this repetition is to imbue in the artist an innate understanding of these natural forms until their balance and nature is understood without thought.
In order to paint a calm and beautiful image the artist must be calm of mind. Mood becomes all important as it will influence the balance and mood of the work. A meditative state results where the brush can flow freely in the artist’s hand – a state of ‘unconscious painting’. So in preparing to paint the panels for Serenity, the serene state of mind was all important. The branches needed to have life, movement, spontaneity – but with grace and calm.
Phantom Serenity is the latest one-off commission to come from the Bespoke team at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. One-off commissions and Bespoke Collections helped Bespoke sales to grow globally by 31% in 2014, with 85% of all Rolls-Royce motor cars sold around the world commissioned with some level of Bespoke content.
Whilst every Rolls-Royce is special, nearly every customer desires extraordinary distinguishing features to make their car completely unique. Fulfilling these requests falls to the marque’s Bespoke design department; a collective of the automotive world’s finest designers, engineers and craftspeople.
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