An Exclusive First Look at Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin’s Fantastical Belmond Train Carriage

Reported by Vogue.

Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin have never exactly done anything quietly. The duo behind Moulin Rouge! and Elvis have now turned their maximalist gaze on a very different kind of production: a restored Pullman train carriage for Belmond's British Pullman, unveiled this week in all its velvet-and-marquetry glory. According to Vogue, the project centers on a fictional 1920s muse named Celia — a West End actress and legendary party-thrower who supposedly received the private car as a gift after a career-defining turn as Titania in a 1932 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Celia isn't real. The carriage absolutely is.

The result is exactly what you'd expect from two people constitutionally incapable of understatement: tasseled purple velvet sofas, kaleidoscopic floral marquetry walls executed by A. Dunn & Son (an Essex family workshop whose great-grandfather made designs for the Titanic), backlit glass ceilings, and scalloped dining chairs in forest green and maroon. Every element was built bespoke across England — custom furniture from Bill Cleyndert in Norfolk, glasswork from Tony Sandles in Essex, embroideries from London's Hand & Lock — then assembled in the final weeks like, as Martin put it, "a Meccano system where all the panels clicked in at the last minute." The private dining car seats up to 12 and is available for exclusive group bookings only. Even the air is considered: a custom scent will drift through public areas, then translate into soap and hand lotion in the bathroom, designed so guests sense Celia's presence before they can name why.

A Derelict Car Gets the Glow-Up of the Century

Martin described the original carriage — dormant since 1972 — as a "derelict third-class" shell when they first encountered it. The emotional weight of its first test run wasn't lost on her. "The time just flew by," she said of an eight-hour journey across two days. "One minute we were leaving the station, and the next we were back — just like a puff of smoke." Luhrmann, for his part, drew a direct line between the train experience and his filmmaking philosophy: the goal is always to pull people out of their lives entirely and return them, as he put it, "spiritually renewed." He signed on immediately after a family trip on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express; the Belmond team had tracked the couple down through their longtime lawyer after identifying Luhrmann as a dream collaborator.

Somehow, this entire project was folded into a schedule that also included co-overseeing the Met Gala's creative direction and the final stages of pre-production on Luhrmann's forthcoming Joan of Arc biopic. "I'm probably a little more stretched than usual," he acknowledged, laughing. But both he and Martin frame these lateral creative detours — hotels, bars, train carriages — as essential to keeping the work alive, not as distractions from it. A launch celebration aboard the carriage is already in the works. Luhrmann's exact words: "Handing around cigars. Very soon."

If the measure of success is making passengers feel like they've walked into a Luhrmann film, this one was always going to pass.

Read the original at Vogue.