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Custom Rolls-Royce Rose Phantom is a private garden party for two

What a Rolls-Royce customer wants, a Rolls-Royce customer gets. An entrepreneur from Stockholm, Sweden, named Ayad Al Saffar recently commissioned this bespoke Phantom with the dream of being enveloped in an elegant floral arrangement. Using a rose garden at the House of Rolls-Royce as inspiration, designers shaped more than one million embroidered stitches into an entanglement of greenery, flowers, and butterflies. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars CEO Torsten Muller Otvos calls it the Rose Phantom.  Apparently, the person who ordered this Phantom likes flowers so much that he named two of four children after plants. Now, a personal garden goes anywhere the car goes. The custom order was a natural fit in the Phantom, as the Rolls-Royce Rose Garden in Goodwood, West Sussex, is the only place in the world that grows the Phantom Rose, a flower created exclusively for Rolls-Royce by British rose breeder Philip Harkness. The customer's daughter Magnolia chose the Peacock Blue exterior on the Phantom. Embellished with a touch of flair, it has a Charles Blue double pinstripe along the beltline, as do the wheels, which are meant to mimic a floral design. The simple and stately exterior makes the interior stand out all the more. Inside, satin stitch Phantom Roses adorn the doors and the starlight headliner. The design shows the flowers in multiple stages of growth and is intended to portray a floral net spreading throughout the vehicle. Even the driver gets to enjoy the foliage, as the glass-encased dashboard has its own bouquet. A final touch uses Peacock and Adonis Blue butterflies to add a bit of motion to the scene. The cabin scheme inverts the exterior colorway and uses Charles Blue leather Serenity Seating with Peacock Blue piping.  Al Saffar says it took him 35 years to achieve his dream of buying a Rolls-Royce.

Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail a dark floral love letter to customization

Rolls-Royce's boat-themed custom vehicle developments have gone from the 2017 Sweptail to the 2021 Boat Tail and now the Droptail — to be precise, the La Rose Noire Droptail. This is the first of four coachbuilt Droptails, handed over in a private gathering near Pebble Beach to the family that commissioned it. The name La Rose Noire blows a kiss to the Black Baccara, a hybrid tea rose created in France around 25 years ago and a favorite of the matriarch in the family that commissioned the Rolls-Royce. The flower's petals shimmer from almost black to dark red-burgundy and pomegranate depending on the light and the angle of view. Two hues represent this fierce luster on the car: a deep red called True Love and a darker red called Mystery. Painters applied the iridescent True Love to the body with a secret base coat followed by five layers of clear lacquer, each lacquer layer blended with a slightly different tone of red. Rolls-Royce says it took more than 150 experiments to perfect the final product. True Love appears again on the Pantheon upper grille, the shade painted on the backs of the grille vanes. Rolls-Royce 3D-printed the lower intake in a composite material, accented with 202 stainless-steel ingots painted in True Love. Mystery bows on the 22-inch alloy wheels, contrasted with millwork that exposes the alloy spokes underneath. And a new chrome plating process created the darkly reflective Hydroshade tint of the brightwork. Removing the custom roof with its electrochromic glass panel reveals a cockpit that Rolls-Royce used to set new standards for its craftsmanship. The buyers wanted parquetry with a motif of scattering rose petals. Rolls-Royce decided the best way to achieve that would be to create and finish 1,603 Black Sycamore veneer triangles by hand, and lay 503 red veneer pieces asymmetrically among them to represent the petals. The woodwork runs across the instrument panel and in an element along the doors, then down the tail. The application was so intense that a single artist worked in one-hour stints no more than five hours a day in a sound-insulated room "to ensure the focus required."  Then there's the treasure in the instrument panel. The commissioning family went to Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet for a custom timepiece, a 43-millimeter Royal Oak Concept Split-Seconds Chronograph GMT Large Date.

Autoblog's top 50 car photos of 2016

This one shouldn't need much explanation. We like cars a whole lot, and that includes not just driving them but taking great pictures of them. We've collected our 50 favorite images from this year in the mega-gallery above. It's a mix of old and new, with a healthy dose of vintage and modern race cars mixed in, and not one single shot under the harsh lights of an auto show. So click through and enjoy. Featured Gallery Autoblog's Top 50 Photos of 2016 View 50 Photos Image Credit: Copyright 2016 Autoblog.com Audi BMW Chevrolet Dodge Ferrari Ford Lamborghini Mazda McLaren Mercedes-Benz Porsche Rolls-Royce Volvo Convertible Coupe Motorcycle Luxury Racing Vehicles Performance Supercars Classics