The Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Is The World’s Most Expensive Custom Car
The $30 million color-changing stunner comes with its own Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Concept chronograph and Champagne vintage.
Complex one-off paint coats and personalized engravings are expected by those who pay handsomely for custom luxury cars from revered marques. But Rolls-Royce customers with cap-less budgets want truly bespoke bodywork, unprecedented interiors and all-around next-level opulence.
Those clients will bypass Rolls’ top-tier Black Badge production range and head to the Coachbuild division, which previously created the “Sweptail“—once the world’s most expensive new car—and the one-of-four Boat Tail endowed with its own dining suite.
The latest Roll-Royce Coachbuild commission is the La Rose Noire, the first of four two-door, two-seat Droptails that the brand will build. The exterior is inspired by the Black Baccara rose—said to to be the favorite flower of the client’s mother. In nature, its dark pomegranate petals shine with a deep shade of red under direct sunlight but appear almost black when shaded.
Like the flower, La Rose Noire’s color changes depending on the perspective and lighting conditions. To achieve this effect, surface finish specialists developed a completely new paint process involving a “secret” base coat and five layers of clear lacquer, each blended with a slightly different tone of red. Two main colors were blended throughout the process: “True Love” red and a darker tone dubbed “Mystery.”
Complementing “Hydroshade” bright work is not painted by applied via a process featuring a “specific chrome electrolyte [that’s] introduced in the chrome plating process and co-deposited on each stainless-steel substrate in a layer just one micron thick – roughly the same width as a strand of spider-web silk.”
The removable hardtop is also noteworthy, as it’s low-slung shape was designed exclusively for La Rose Noire. At the push of a button, electrochromic glass becomes nearly translucent, offering nearly full-circle views of the exterior environment. “True Love” red paint also covers the Pantheon grille veins and lower front air intake, while the alloy wheels are rendered in the darker “Mystery” hue with shimmering red undertones.
But Rolls says the “most remarkable” element is the cocooning interior, one that took nearly two years to develop for the client. The “most complex expression of parquetry” ever implemented in a Spirit of Ecstasy-adorned ride features 1,603 pieces of wood veneer triangles, 1,070 of which are perfectly symmetrical, Black Sycamore background elements and 533 of which are asymmetrically positioned red pieces meant to evoke scattered rose petals. The wooden pattern stretches from the rear shawl panel through the doors and onto the fascia.
The client also requested that a specially commissioned Audemars Piguet 43mm Royal Oak Concept Split-Seconds Chronograph GMT Large Date be mounted in the interior, but with a catch: It also needed to be able to be removed, attached to a strap and worn. As such, a powered clasp mechanism was created that presents the timepiece at the touch of a button, after which the aperture in the fasica is covered with an elegant titanium blank head watch that showcases a white-gold coin on a rose engraving.
In addition to luxe Swiss watches, the client also a taste for fine Champagne, so much so that they commissioned an exclusive vintage of Champagne de Lossy. Accordingly, Rolls-Royce built a Champagne Chest with an exterior lid that becomes a Black Sycamore serving tray for the hand-blown crystal Champagne flutes.
The sides feature the same parquetry work featured on the dash, and once deployed, they reveal to hammocks that display the clients’ special Champagne vintage. Stored thermal champagne coolers, made from black anodized aluminum and carbon fiber, are finished in the dark Mystery hue and ensure the champagne is maintained at the optimum drinking temperature.
According to Business Insider, the Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire cost the client more than $30 million, likely making it the most expensive custom car in the world.