Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Middle East is delighted to present a Bespoke collection of Ghost family cars, inspired by the incredible tales of ‘The Arabian Nights Entertainment’.

A series of two-tone paint schemes, specially created by the Bespoke team at the Home of Rolls-Royce in Goodwood, England, draws on a warm colour palette that serves as the perfect backdrop for hand-painted coachlines. These intricately applied detail touches, expressing the Arabic words ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ culminate in an elaborate design that elegantly frames the car’s door handles.

Regarded as one of the region’s most famous works of literature, the epic tales told by Scheherazade to Shahryar have captivated readers and storytellers for centuries.

Geoff Briscoe, Director Middle East, Africa and Latin America for Rolls-Royce Motor Cars said: “A Rolls-Royce is the perfect canvas from which to commission highly individual motoring masterpieces. The One Thousand and One Nights collection is a testament to the ability of our Bespoke designers to take inspiration from a rich array of cultures.”

The limited ‘One Thousand and One Nights Bespoke Ghost Collection will be launched in three chapters. Chapter one will be unveiled at the Sharjah International Automobile Show on 28 November 2012. Chapters two and three will follow in the first and third quarter of 2013 respectively.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is delighted to announce the launch of Ghost V-Specification; a limited series of Ghost and Ghost Extended Wheelbase motor cars that will be available for customers to commission from January to June 2014.

“This limited series celebrates one of Ghost’s defining characteristics; the exquisite 6.6 litre Rolls-Royce V12 engine,” said Torsten Müller-Ötvös, Chief Executive, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. “Since its introduction in 2009, an extraordinary marriage of assured presence and remarkable driving dynamics has endeared Ghost to a new generation of highly discerning businessmen and women, ensuring the car’s position as the statement of choice for a growing band of successful entrepreneurs around the world.”

At the heart of the Ghost’s driving experience is its hallmark V12 engine. Acceleration is delivered with a characteristic immediacy and smoothness, propelling occupants from 0 to 60 mph in just 4.7 seconds with 80% of power available from idle. This unique powertrain is celebrated with a 30bhp / 22kw power increase on all Ghost V-Specification motor cars.

Elegantly applied design touches hint at Ghost V-Specification’s inherent dynamism.

V-Specification motif coachlines finish the exterior paint-scheme whilst customers can either choose from five specially selected exterior colours, or from Rolls-Royce’s 44,000 hue palette. Optional visible chrome exhausts and 21” part-polished wheels add further expression to the car’s dynamic promise.

The V-Specification motif is echoed around the car’s handcrafted interior through engraving to the treadplates, embroidery to the rear armrest and hand-applied steel inlays to the front multimedia screen lid. The interior is completed with an exclusively designed clock with a black crown surrounding the face.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars debuts Ghost ‘Eternal Love’ this evening at the Minsheng Art Museum in Beijing. Embodying the theme of love, the new Bespoke collection is exclusively designed for the China market, coupling modern design elements inspired by the white swan with remarkable Rolls-Royce craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology.

Leon Li, Director of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars China, explained the significance of the latest design, “The Ghost ‘Eternal Love’ demonstrates to our customers the unparalleled creativity of the Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Bespoke team while it meets the needs of our customers for exclusive personalisation. Embodied in this latest masterpiece is the emotional inheritance of the Rolls-Royce brand, a representation of our undying passion for creating the best cars in the world. More than this, it symbolises the Chinese New Year gift to customers from Rolls-Royce.”

Ghost ‘Eternal Love’ Collection

The swan design, incorporated throughout the new collection, is a tribute to love. In both Eastern and Western culture, the swan's gracefulness and fidelity make it a symbol of purity and loyalty. Unions between swans are sustained for years, even entire lifetimes, creating a bond so deep that a partner has been known to take its own life when its lover dies. Thus in traditional Chinese culture, swans are known as ‘love birds’ for their genuine commitment to everlasting love.

Inspired by the romance, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has embraced the artistic image of the swan and styled it with exquisite craftsmanship. An image of two swans forming a perfect heart is depicted on the Eternal Love’s signature coachline and leather seatbacks. It is worth mentioning that the delicate swans in the interior are elaborately adorned with a hand-embroidered embellishment. The impeccable luxury and first-class engineering of the car interior elevate the artistry to a new height.

All Rolls-Royce car models are adorned with the Spirit of Ecstasy, a figurine for the marque created by British sculptor Charles Sykes. The artist, a graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, is believed to have drawn inspiration from the close relationship of John Montagu and Eleanor Thornton, the woman thought to have been the model for the emblem. To this day, the iconic figurine still stands serenely on the bonnet of each Rolls-Royce and continues to facilitate its owner in creating beautiful relationships.

Echoing the theme of a swan’s elegant, pure and loyal approach to love, the Ghost 'Eternal Love' features a two-tone exterior of English White and Silver Satin. The interior leather is Seashell, whilst the headrest embroidery, seat stitching and interior car roof are Hotspur Red. A Bespoke clock, painted to match the Bespoke Tudor Oak wood panel, and illuminated treadplates both bear the words ‘Love is Eternity’. A final touch of sophistication is lent to the car by a two-tone steering wheel to achieve this level of added perfection.

Fully polished 20” forged alloy wheels and the addition of Satellite Aided Transmission ensure the ‘Eternal Love’ remains a perfectly executed expression of consummate Rolls-Royce luxury. Powered by the beloved 6.6 litre twin-turbo V12 powertrain and an eight-speed ZF gearbox, the ‘Eternal Love’ offers its discerning customers an exceptional and effortless driving experience under any road conditions.

To ensure exclusivity, Rolls-Royce Ghost ‘Eternal Love’ will be produced in a series of only sixteen.

In 2009, Rolls-Royce announced a new addition to its portfolio that offered something entirely different to its flagship Phantom. This product resonated with a new group of men and women who responded to the marque's relentless pursuit of perfection in design, engineering and craftsmanship, but sought a more modest and minimalist expression of Rolls-Royce. The execution of the first Goodwood Ghost, and its laser focus on meeting the demands of its clients, was an unmitigated success, and over the course of its ten-year lifecycle, this transformative motor car became the most successful product in the company's 116-year history. Ghost's formidable success was vital in enabling the brand to scale up production, invest in its capabilities and establish Rolls-Royce as the truly global brand it is today.

Additionally, Ghost's decade-long market presence enabled the marque's Luxury Intelligence Specialists to gather vital information about developing behaviours in how Ghost clients use their motor car, how they commission it and how they perceive Rolls-Royce. These highly successful and diverse entrepreneurs and founders, who selected this product to celebrate their ongoing ascension, were citizens of the world - they had been educated abroad, they travelled extensively and experienced Rolls-Royce in many cultures.

Due to Ghost's energetic, dynamic personality, these clients came to realise that the Rolls-Royce brand could offer more than a chauffeur-driven experience. Indeed, in the United States of America and areas of Europe, clients were self-driving their Ghost from the very early stages of its introduction. Meanwhile, in Asia, clients were engaging heavily in the connected technology on board, be it for business or pleasure.

Across all markets, when clients commissioned their Ghost they asked the marque's representatives about the driving experience, even if they had selected an extended wheelbase. During the weekend, this business tool morphed into a discreet celebration - clients would switch to the driver's seat and relish a trip to a restaurant or second home with their friends and family. They celebrated this breadth of character, and this reflected in less formal colourways and more personalisation in the driver's eyeline. These were profound learnings.

Meanwhile, at Goodwood, significant advances were being made with the marque's proprietary aluminium spaceframe architecture. First used on Phantom, then Cullinan, this spaceframe is unique to Rolls-Royce and enables the brand's designers and engineers to develop an authentically super-luxury product, free from the constraints of platforms used to underpin high-volume vehicles. As Ghost clients required even more of their motor car, Rolls-Royce used its architecture to respond, incorporating technology such as all-wheel drive and all-wheel steering in Ghost, unlocking an entirely new, purposeful personality.

Concurrently, the design team were tracking an emerging movement that came to define Ghost's aesthetic treatment. It spoke of a shifting attitude among Ghost clients in the way success is expressed. Named 'Post Opulence' internally, it is characterised by reduction and substance. In service to this, exceptional materials must be selected and celebrated. Design must be limited, intelligent and unobtrusive. This philosophy is the antithesis of 'premium mediocracy', a term coined by the fashion cognoscenti. This refers to products that use superficial treatments, such as large branding or, in the context of motor cars, busy stitching and other devices that create an illusion of luxury by dressing products lacking in substance in a premium skin.

The collective result is new Rolls-Royce Ghost. This is a motor car precisely tailored to its clients, that appears perfect in its simplicity, that is underpinned by remarkable substance, that is less but better.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has a unique fluency in its clients. Its close relationship with the women and men who patronise the marque affords the company's decision-makers an unparalleled understanding of the super-luxury consumer: their aesthetic preferences, uncompromising lifestyle requirements and changing taste patterns. Only with this understanding, and briefings supplied by the brand's Luxury Intelligence Unit, is the marque able to create an accurate product response. Black Badge is a vivid example of this.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has always attracted subversive clients - rebellious women and men who built their success by breaking rules, taking risks and challenging conventions. In the 2020s, these women and men engage with luxury products on their own terms. They reject suits for streetwear, use blockchain not banks and influence the analogue world through their digital endeavours. In doing so, they have created new codes of luxury that resonate with their sensibilities: darker in aesthetic, assertive in character and bold in design.

Their approach to Rolls-Royce products is no different. The marque has responded accordingly, developing new colour palettes, more technical surface treatments and even more powerful driving experiences without ever compromising the effortless sensibilities that have drawn this bold group of clients to the Rolls-Royce brand.

Black Badge, the highly successful alter ego of Rolls-Royce, now represents more than 27% of commissions worldwide and is codified by the mathematical symbol that represents a potential infinity, which is found within the motor car's interior. This graphic, also known as the Lemniscate, was applied to Sir Malcolm Campbell's record-breaking Rolls-Royce-powered Blue Bird K3 hydroplane and the marque's designers nominated this hallmark for Black Badge motor cars to reflect their own unrelenting pursuit of power.

Rolls-Royce debuted Black Badge with Wraith and Ghost in 2016, followed by Dawn in 2017 then Cullinan in 2019. Today, a new, Post Opulent expression of Black Badge joins the family. The purest and most technologically advanced Black Badge motor car yet, Black Badge Ghost.

THE DARK SIDE OF POST OPULENCE

Conceived in response to a group of clients who requested a Rolls-Royce that was agile, discreet, highly connected and free of any superfluous design, the new Ghost is not just the most technologically advanced Rolls-Royce yet, but also the most aesthetically pure. In the twelve months since this motor car has been available, it has become one of the fastest-selling products in the marque's history, representing more than 3,500 commissions worldwide.

This motor car also started a new design conversation in its relentless pursuit of minimalism and purity. Named 'Post Opulence' by Rolls-Royce designers, this aesthetic movement is characterised by reduction and substance. In service to this, exceptional materials are selected and celebrated while overt design is limited, intelligent and unobtrusive.

However, within this group of clients - who celebrate minimalism and material substance - a rebellious subset sought to create a disruptive expression of Ghost by permanently cloaking it in a shade so pure that its very classification as a colour remains a subject of debate: black. Black Badge Ghost reflects these clients' desires. It is the dark side of Post Opulence: minimalism in extremis.

Rolls-Royce Ghost provides the purest blank canvas for Bespoke personalisation. The expressive nature of Ghost is unleashed with the 'Boracay Blue' exterior colour of the 'Expressionism' commission, evoking the sunsets over Boracay Island. This vivid Bespoke colour captures unique hues witnessed during the transition from sunset to twilight, when the sky appears to become one with the Sulu Sea. This is accentuated with a single hand-painted Lime Green Coachline, subtly referencing Boracay Island's rich, tropical flora and fauna. The exterior is resolved with part-polished 21-inch alloy wheels incorporating Orbit Grey centres and Lime Green pinstripes, shod in White pinstripe tyres.

Inside, the seats are trimmed with Black and Arctic White leather with Lime Green accents. The latter hue also appears in the seat and door piping, contrast stitching and headrest monograms.

The inner door pockets are embroidered with a celestial motif, rendered in Lime Green. To add texture and depth to this elegant expression of contemporary craft, the marque's artisans used two different, contrasting stitching techniques. By carefully alternating the direction and angle of the stitch, the embroidery accentuates the curve of the pocket, creating a subtle three-dimensional effect. A total of 104,268 stitches are used across all four doors.

Above, the Starlight Headliner is presented in a vivid, abstract wave pattern, like silk in the wind, mimicking the embroidered pattern on the doors. The design is created with 520 Lime Green and 520 White 'stars' with eight White 'shooting stars' that follow the curvature of the design.