Rolls-Royce has revealed the Phantom Hummingbird, a Dubai-commissioned Private Commission that introduces abalone shell marquetry to the marque for the first time.
Rolls-Royce has unveiled the Phantom Hummingbird , a one-off Private Commission that introduces abalone shell marquetry to the marque for the first time. Built on the Phantom Extended and arranged through Private Office Dubai, the car was created as a tribute from a client to his wife.
A Tribute Built Around a Hummingbird
The car takes its name from the hummingbird, which Rolls-Royce describes as a symbol of joy and resilience. A hand-painted hummingbird runs along the exterior coachline, and the same motif reappears inside, worked into the cabin’s marquetry panels.
Phil Fabre de la Grange, Rolls-Royce’s Head of Bespoke, said the abalone shell gave the brand’s designers and craftspeople a fresh creative and technical challenge. The material’s nacreous inner surface produces a blue-green shimmer that shifts with the light, echoing the way a hummingbird’s feathers scatter light into colour.
Marquetry That Took Nine Months to Perfect
Abalone shell is thin and brittle, making it an unusually difficult material for automotive marquetry. Rolls-Royce says its Bespoke Collective needed six attempts before settling on a workable technique, across a development process that ran more than nine months.
Each piece of shell and mother-of-pearl is laser-cut 0.06mm oversized to allow for the laser’s burn margin, then filed by hand to its final shape and fitted seam-free against its neighbours. That hand-fitting was especially critical on the hummingbird’s wings.
Each Picnic Table carries a hummingbird made from 53 pieces of abalone and mother-of-pearl, 18 of them in the wings alone. The Rear Waterfall panel between the rear seats features an 84-piece botanical design. Completing the three panels took 45 hours of craft time in total.
A Palette to Match
Ash Burr veneer forms the backdrop across all three marquetry panels, with Silver Birch veneer, cut from a single log chosen for its grain, used within the Picnic Table motifs. The cabin is trimmed in Creme Light leather with Moccasin and Tan accents, over Seashell carpets and a Starlight headliner.
Outside, a Wildberry lower body meets White Sands upper bodywork, split by a hand-applied White Sands coachline that carries the hummingbird motif along the car’s length. Rolls-Royce lists WLTP combined CO2 emissions for the Phantom Extended at 362-373g/km.
The Phantom Hummingbird adds to Rolls-Royce’s growing list of Bespoke firsts, and shows how far its Private Commission programme now reaches beyond paint and embroidery into genuinely new materials and techniques.
