ANY crypto bro can buy a Rolls-Royce, but you have to practically be family before the storied marque will invite you to design your own from scratch. So far, only five such people have had that privilege, and one of them lives in Singapore.

The unnamed buyer took delivery of his one-off Rolls at a special handover ceremony at Gardens By The Bay on Feb 29. Speculation is rife online that the exquisite two-seat roadster, named the Arcadia Droptail, cost as much as £20 million (S$34.1 million) – and that’s before taxes.

If the numbers being bandied about are accurate, that would make the Arcadia 40 times more expensive than Rolls’ own Phantom limousine.

The Arcadia is the latest car to emerge from Rolls-Royce’s invitation-only Coachbuild programme. It revives an idea that predates mass production, when car companies would build a running chassis and coach-builders would then finish it with bodywork made to the owner’s precise specifications.

Former chief executive Torsten Muller-Otvos (who retired in November last year) unveiled Coachbuild in 2021 to offer the brand’s most ardent fans the chance to commission something much more exclusive than the run-of-the-mill Rolls-Royce. This came as the firm’s annual sales climbed past 6,000 cars, six times higher than the year before Muller-Otvos took up the top job.

The idea isn’t sui generis in the car world (Ferrari builds one or two unique machines a year for its besties as part of its One-Off programme), and Rolls-Royce says practically all of its cars leave the factory with some sort of customisation carried out by the crew in its Bespoke division. But Coachbuild is about turning a client’s dreams into reality, down to the tiniest detail.

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Take the wood panelling that covers the Arcadia Droptail’s rear deck. The buyer insisted that Rolls-Royce use Santos Straight Grain rosewood, a richly textured and delicate material but one notorious for being difficult to work with. It took 8,000 hours to figure out how to utilise the wood properly, plus another 1,000 hours to develop a special coating to weatherproof it. The result? 233 pieces that feature the finest grain of any wood type ever used in a Rolls-Royce.

To add depth, designers infused the car’s white paint with aluminium and glass particles, with larger-than-usual metal flakes for the extra shimmer that the buyer wanted. Rolls-Royce says the Arcadia’s dashboard houses the most complicated clock face it has ever had to work on, with a 119-faceted surface that took two years to develop and five months to craft.

As you’d expect, cars like these have a dedicated team at Coachbuild to pull off such feats. Ten to 15 designers and engineers toiled exclusively on the Arcadia for more than four years to bring it from sketch to reality, says Alex Innes, the division’s head. “Fundamentally, the genetics of the car are unique,” he tells The Business Times.

In a sense, that is because cars like the Arcadia contain DNA both from Rolls-Royce and the commissioning client. “This car is created in the image of Sir Henry Royce and Charles Rolls, as far as what we can provide, but is also in the image of what the clients can dream up,” says Anders Warming, the director of design for Rolls-Royce.

That being so, the 118-year-old car company isn’t about to conceive a Coachbuild car with any old soul.

“First, we have to know you extremely well,” says Innes. That means mere money isn’t enough to secure you the chance to design your own Rolls. “It’s actually more about an understanding of the individual’s character and their ambition, because what we have come to realise is if we are not aligned on ambition and a singular vision for what we want to do together with the clients, then it is almost always an issue.”

Emma Begley, Rolls-Royce’s director of global communications, puts it more bluntly. “This isn’t about someone saying to us, ‘Here’s 20 million, build me a car.’” Coachbuild clients, says Innes, know the CEO “on a personal level”.

As for what would persuade a person to fill a cheque with so many digits for one car, he says it is about what each Coachbuild project represents.

“It’s an extraordinary undertaking on our side, but the clients see this also as an equally monumental thing in their lives,” he says. “We say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing for people of extraordinary success, but we often find that it really is, you know. This is the ultimate expression of accomplishment.” Sorry, crypto bros.