SIMPLICITY AND SUBTLE RESTRAINT
While making a strong statement about the client’s personal style, the Arcadia Droptail is the perfect example of quiet disrespect for the rules of luxury. It celebrates the purity of form and natural materials. A person with a keen interest in architecture and design commissioned Arcadia Droptail. It shows the patron’s sense of style and personal rules of luxury, which are characterised by simplicity and subtle restraint. It also shows their strong belief in simplifying things to get to their core.
The name of this coach-built order comes from the mythical realm of Arcadia, which was known in Ancient Greek mythology as “Heaven on Earth” because of its stunning natural beauty and perfect unity. Like the haven that gives the project its name, the client saw Arcadia Droptail as a calm place with minimal elements, rich materials, and a pleasant feel that would help them escape the stress of their work life.
The designers at Coachbuild looked at art, sculpture, and buildings from the client’s favourite places around the world to find inspiration for the theme of calmness. This included the detailed and rich contemporary tropical sky gardens found in Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam, as well as the British “Biomimetic” style of architecture, which values natural shapes and honest materials.
Besides these examples, the client was also moved by the car itself and the simplicity of the Droptail design idea. The client who hired Coachbuild demanded that their custom-built car had to be an exact copy of the first hand-drawn sketch they were shown in 2019.
The shape of this very modern take on the roadster body type was what really spoke to the person who commissioned the work. They were especially interested in the car’s bold, low stance, cosy interior, and dramatic body lines. They also noticed right away that Droptail’s “sail cowls” were boat-inspired. Named for the way they look like a yacht’s jib, these sharp, angular shapes rise behind the doors and curve slowly inward, drawing attention to the people inside the car.
To meet the client’s desire to respect Droptail’s shape, Rolls-Royce Coachbuild designers came up with a calm, natural two-tone colour scheme for the car’s body. The client wanted to create a classic white that would look like a solid colour at first glance but be interesting to look at more closely in natural light. To do this, the main colour of the body is a solid white that has metal and glass bits mixed in. This makes the coachwork sparkle like bubbles when the light hits it, and when you look closely, it gives the paint the impression of never-ending depth. Using bigger aluminium bits, Rolls-Royce engineers made a metal with more angles and a striking look. The client was very clear about how they wanted the Bespoke silver to look and how strong they wanted the contrast to be between the white and the silver.
In a big difference from the other three coachbuilt Droptails in this series, the carbon fibre used to build the lower parts of the Droptail is painted in a solid Bespoke silver colour instead of being left fully or partially exposed. This makes the car look “lifted” in profile, emphasising its slim, athletic design.
The customer is especially interested in the bright mirror finish of the brightwork on old Rolls-Royces, so the outer grille surround, “kinked” vane pieces, and 22-inch alloy wheels have all been fully mirror-polished.
Arcadia Droptail’s outer colour scheme is full of small details, but its main goal is to highlight the shape and size of the coachwork. The client was especially drawn to Droptail’s smooth, solid surface and bold use of negative sculpture. These features are brought out by the car’s soft paint colours, which reflect light and make dramatic shadows that draw attention to Droptail’s many subtle design movements.
The outside of the Rolls-Royce Arcadia Droptail celebrates the shape of the car, while the inside is a highly personal mirror of the client’s unique style, similar to how they have styled their homes and businesses around the world. The colour scheme and handling of materials in Arcadia Droptail were meant to make a personal statement and be easily recognisable as the signature of the person who commissioned the piece.
Wood development was a big part of both the inside of Arcadia Droptail and the client’s expectations. The client was very particular about the structure, grain, colour, and richness of the wood itself. The buyer gave Rolls-Royce Coachbuild designers and material experts a lot of examples of what they liked and what inspired them from buildings, homes, and classic cars.
In the end, Santos Straight Grain was chosen as the most current statement because of its rich texture and interesting look, which come from the way its grains connect.
The workers at the marque had a hard time working with this high-density wood on the inside of Droptail. Among the woods used in a Rolls-Royce, Santos Straight Grain has one of the best grain types. However, it is very fragile and easily tears when cut, and it “checks” (forms a crack running parallel to the grain) when it dries. Even though it’s hard to work with this sensitive material, Santos Straight Grain is used all over Droptail. It’s even used in the aerodynamically useful rear deck section, where the grain of the open-pore veneer is put at a perfect 55° angle. Rolls-Royce craftsmen used a total of 233 pieces of wood to make the Arcadia Droptail, with 76 pieces just being used on the back deck to achieve a perfect composition over difficult geometry.
Because the Arcadia Droptail will be used all over the world, including in some tropical areas, extra care was taken to create a safety system and testing method for the wood surfaces that will be seen from the outside. At first, coatings used on superyachts were considered, but were turned down because they needed to be serviced and reapplied often. Instead, a custom finish was made that only needs to be applied once for the life of the car.
To make sure this layer worked, Rolls-Royce engineers came up with a special way to test it. They put veneer pieces through a tough cycle inside a machine that mimicked extreme weather conditions around the world. For this, pieces of sample wood were sprayed with water every so often while they were being left to dry in the dark and then put in heat and bright light.
This had to be done 1,000 times on 18 different samples before the brand’s experts were happy with how long the pieces would last. The wood pieces and protective covering took more than 8,000 hours to make in total.
The leather on the inside is finished in two custom colours that were chosen just for the client and are named after them. The main leather colour is a Bespoke White shade that goes with the outer paint theme. The contrast leather is a Bespoke Tan shade that was made to look great with the chosen wood.
The beautiful scarf panel that connects all four Droptail cars is also inside. It is the longest piece of wood that has ever been seen on a Rolls-Royce car. In the Arcadia Droptail, it is made of the same Santos Straight Grain open pore wood as the back deck. It is book-matched at the same 55° angle and has left stripes that are each a different shape that run through the door linings without showing. CAD tools were used to plan where each piece of wood would go. This panel alone is made up of 40 sections, each of which was digitally mapped before being attached to the car, even though it looks like it’s made up of just two mirrored pieces of veneer.
Rolls-Royce engineers had to make a whole new framework for several parts in order to apply wood to the Droptail’s interior’s complex curves. The dashboard, door linings, and centre cantilevered “plinth” seat had to have very complicated shapes that had to be very rigid to keep the wood pieces stable once they were put in place. Carbon fibre stacking methods used in Formula 1 racing were used by engineers to make a very stiff base that the wood could be attached to. This way, the wood would stay in place no matter how fast or how far the car went.
Designers and workers at Rolls-Royce Coachbuild created and constructed the clock on the Santos Straight Grain wood fascia. This work of haute horlogerie is the most complicated Rolls-Royce clock face ever made. It took five months just to put it together, after more than two years of planning and designing.
The clock has a beautiful geometric guilloché design made of raw metal that has 119 sides. This is a symbolic nod to the brand’s history, since the client saw a sneak peek of the car for the first time in late 2023, which was Rolls-Royce’s 119th anniversary year. The carefully made clock face has 12 “chaplets,” or hour marks, that are each only 0.1mm thick and have hands that are partly polished and partly brushed. To make sure the watch could be read, experts gave each chaplet an infill bridge and painted them by hand using a camera that could enlarge a picture up to 100 times.
A lot of haute horlogerie techniques were used to make the watch, but Rolls-Royce has stricter standards for testing and approval than the watch world. This meant that the marque’s experts had to use a wide range of materials. For example, the minute marking on the watch is not anodized, as is common in the watch industry. Instead, it is finished with a ceramic covering that is chosen for its durability and good looks. Lasers were used to remove small pieces of the coating to show the mirror shine of the metal material below. They were all individually made from solid stainless steel billet and cleaned by hand before being put together, just like the Bespoke “double R” logo and every other part of the watch.
The instrument dials and the clock’s themes are paired together, using the same materials, methods, and ways of doing things. They all have the same repeated guilloché design, as well as frosted white inserts, brushed and polished brightwork, and the colour scheme of the car.
Because the buyer lives in different countries, the car is set up with a left-hand drive, so it can be used anywhere in the world. The client who ordered the car thought this foreign aspect was so important that the Coachbuild Collective wanted them to see the car in several places around the world before it was built. Coachbuild designers used the brand’s “holodeck” to make this possible. The “holodeck” is a unique virtual 3D setting where the client can use advanced virtual reality (VR) gear to see how the car would look in different places around the world.
Every Rolls-Royce customer is different, but they all have a strong sense of what they want, and this person’s needs were made clear from the start. That being said, it took a lot of work to turn these complicated and very personal ideas into a design that makes sense and works. It was here that the Coachbuild process, which took an unheard-of four years and put the client and the brand in a very close relationship, paid off in ways that are hard to measure.
Coachbuild designers spent months asking the client a lot of questions about their tastes in everything from clothes and furniture to food and places to visit. This helped them come up with a style that was based on the client’s truth and experience. It was a factual depiction of both their internal and external environments, supported by the design team’s own expertise, understanding, and professional judgement. A client’s daughter and other family members also get involved with the process. When the finished design was done, the client’s extended family was asked to look it over. Everyone agreed that it was a perfect reflection of the client’s style and personality.
The client felt very good about having their tastes and personalities so clearly explained and reflected back to them. In fact, the process showed that the client had a much more modern view of the world than they thought. They valued ease, using natural materials, and being very precise. Since then, the client has used Arcadia Droptail as a model for orders from other high-end homes and builders.
The fact that this Rolls-Royce Droptail is one of a kind shows how confident, clear-sighted, and long-term this client has been with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. It’s important because of how beautifully simple it is and because Rolls-Royce Coachbuild designers are so good at catching the tastes and personalities of each person.