Rolls-Royce takes nine months to decorate two tables of this Phantom

Rolls-Royce unveiled this week the Phantom Hummingbird, a unique example ordered by a customer in honor of his wife and developed by the brand’s private office in Dubai. The highlight is a first in the manufacturer’s history: it is the first Rolls-Royce with marquetry made of abalone shell.

The choice of material has a curious logic. The hummingbird — which dictates the car’s adornments — has no blue or green pigment in its feathers. The colors come from microstructures that divide and reflect light like small prisms, and change according to the angle of the viewer.

The inner part of the abalone shell does exactly the same thing, with the same blue-green glow. In other words: to reproduce the animal, Rolls-Royce resorted to the same optical trick that the bird itself uses.

53 pieces per bird and a margin of 0.06 mm

Hummingbirds appear on the picnic tables facing the rear seat. Each bird is assembled with 53 pieces of mother-of-pearl and abalone, 18 of which are only on the wings. Between the benches, on the panel named Cachoeira, a botanical motif brings together another 84 pieces.

The development took more than nine months and took six attempts for the team to figure out how to work the abalone, too thin and brittle for traditional marquetry techniques.

Each fragment is laser cut 0.06 mm larger than the final size, precisely to compensate for what the laser itself burns at the edge. Then, everything is filed by hand until one piece touches the other with no visible seam. The final step alone consumed eight hours per panel, and the three added up to 45 hours.

An entire log to hit the shaft

The Silver Birch veneer used in the tables was cut from a single log, chosen and examined thoroughly so that the design of the fibers matched the composition. The bottom of the three panels is by Ash Burr.

The rest of the cabin features Light Cream leather with Moccasin and Tan accents, Seashell carpets and the Starlight Headliner starry roof. On the outside, the bodywork mixes Wildberry at the bottom and White Sands at the top, separated by a hand-applied strip on which another hummingbird flies.

Derived from the Phantom Extended, the car measures 5,98 m in length and has a wheelbase of 3,77 m. Under the hood is the V12 6.75 biturbo engine with 571 hp and 91,8 kgfm, which yields around 6 km/l. Rolls-Royce did not reveal how much the order cost. The catalog Phantom Extended already starts at around US$ 600 thousand, approximately R$ 3,1 million.

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