Bespoke: How the Great Marques Let You Design Your Own Car

For most buyers, personalizing a car means choosing from a list of colors and options. For the clients of the great luxury marques, it means something far greater. Through their bespoke programs, the finest makers will build a car to almost any specification a buyer can imagine, turning the automobile into a wholly personal creation.

The Programs

Nearly every luxury marque now offers one. Rolls-Royce Bespoke is the most famous, capable of matching a paint color to a client's lipstick or embroidering a private scene into the headliner. Ferrari's Tailor Made programme lets owners rework almost every surface of their car, and Bentley's Mulliner, Bugatti's Sur Mesure, Aston Martin's Q division, and Lamborghini's Ad Personam all do the same for their clients. What was once a short options list has become a nearly blank canvas.

What Is Possible

The scope is remarkable. Buyers can specify unique paint mixed to a personal sample, source rare woods and leathers, commission hand painted details and embroidery, and add features drawn from their own lives, a favorite color, a family crest, a meaningful date. The marques employ dedicated designers and craftspeople whose entire role is to realize these visions, however unusual, to the same standard as the car itself.

Why Buyers Do It

The motive is the same one that drives every part of this world, the desire for something no one else has. A bespoke commission turns a car that thousands may own into one that is unmistakably a single person's own, an object as personal as it is valuable. For the buyer, it is the difference between owning a luxury car and owning their luxury car.