On 15 May, a new private dining car, dating back to 1932, takes to the rails as part of Belmond’s British Pullman. What sets it apart from the rest of the heritage train, however, is that its interior is by the film director Baz Luhrmann and his wife, the production designer Catherine Martin. On the face of it, it is a functioning railway carriage, but it is also—if you will—a work of conceptual art, and one that moves, if not through time, then through space.
The couple have conjured a backstory for its namesake, Celia, ostensibly a 1930s Shakespearean actress whose epoch-defining performance of Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired the railcar she came to own. Its new décor (shown above) is a confection of Art Deco: burl veneers, marquetry, stained glass, mosaic and saturated colours, especially the rich red that—from Satine’s gown in Moulin Rouge to the curtains at the Faena hotel in Miami Beach—the partnership have made their signature.
As Luhrmann puts it, travelling in Celia will be “like being transported into another world”, one in which “guests become part of a story” that will, he hopes, “unfold as you drift through the countryside, feeling as though you’ve stepped inside A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. A stretch, perhaps, as you chug out of Victoria Station, through London’s outlying suburbs en route to Bath, Bletchley Park, Chatsworth or Whitstable, the highlights of this summer’s destinations.
This is not the first time Luhrmann and Martin have designed a space connected with a figure they have invented. Last year saw the opening of Monsieur, a bar in New York’s East Village that was notionally inspired by a fictional nightclub impresario, “a part-time poet and full-time enfant terrible”, known only by his French honorific.
And Celia is not Belmond’s first collaboration with a high-profile figure from the arts. Since its acquisition by LVMH, it has persuaded Wes Anderson to impose his whimsical aesthetic on a 1951 parlour car named Cygnus. And in 2024 it unveiled a former sleeping car on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, L’Observatoire, an “artwork in motion” by the French artist JR. One can only speculate as to whom they will ask next. Elmgreen & Dragset would be a bold choice.
- Celia seats 12 and is available only on an exclusive-use basis, from £15,000: belmond.com
