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Once upon a time, there was an actress named Celia. As famous for her turns in the West End as for her late nights partying with the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, she delivered an era-defining performance as Titania, queen of the fairies, in a 1932 production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was so dazzling, in fact, that she was gifted a Pullman train car by a mysterious benefactor. Hidden behind a pair of enormous velvet theater curtains lay a breathtaking jewel box filled with decorative pansy florets, backlit glass ceilings, and delicate wooden marquetry walls.
Celia is, somewhat sadly, not a real-life figure. Instead, she’s the imaginary muse of the legendary Australian director Baz Luhrmann and his partner in life and work, the four-time Oscar-winning designer Catherine Martin. But Celia’s train car is very real—and today, her sumptuous interiors are being shared with the world for the first time, ahead of her first journey with the Belmond British Pullman later this week. “It’s a magical mystery carriage for Celia to dine in, throw parties, probably make out in the nooks and crannies,” says Luhrmann. “Though in the ’20s, we’d call them stolen kisses in the shadows.”
Despite the private dining carriage’s modest proportions, there are indeed plenty of “nooks and crannies” where guests—up to 12 of them, with the carriage exclusively reserved for group bookings—could steal a few kisses. There’s the bar area, with its tasselled purple velvet sofa gently curving under the windows at the end of the train; and those breathtaking marquetry walls, using different colored woods to create kaleidoscopic patterns of flowers and fairies. (These were executed in partnership with A Dunn & Son, an Essex-based, family-run workshop first established in the late 19th century; the current generation’s great-grandfather created designs for the Titanic.) Then there’s the dining room, where green and maroon scalloped chairs and further whimsical wall patterns frame views of the English countryside whizzing by, echoing the hues of the ancient forests the train is set to travel through.
Everything in the carriage was custom-made under Martin’s watchful eye. “She has a natural attachment to craftspeople,” Luhrmann says fondly. “She absolutely loves them.”
“We actually met our train carriage when she was just a derelict third-class carriage, so she’s really had a glow-up,” says Martin, noting that most of the elements were built in various corners of England—custom furniture from Bill Cleyndert in Norfolk, glass from Tony Sandles in Essex, embroideries from Hand & Lock in Fitzrovia—before being assembled in the final weeks. “It was rather like a Meccano system where all the panels clicked in at the last minute,” she explains. “There were all these complex engineering problems that I found fascinating, but I always see design as an act of problem-solving.” The final touch? A bespoke scent that will be (subtly) deployed in the public areas, and translated into soap and hand lotion in the bathroom. “We wanted, when you come into the carriage, for you to feel the presence of Celia in an unseen way,” Martin adds.
The couple’s innate understanding of the attention to detail that underpins great hospitality comes, in part, from their own avid (and adventurous) traveling. After finishing the promotional run for each of his movies, Luhrmann has made a tradition of heading off to a far-flung destination to decompress. Upon wrapping Moulin Rouge!, he swapped rolling cameras for rolling wheels by traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and after Elvis, he departed from Japan on a series of ferries zigzagging the South China Sea. “I call it the methadone program—how to get off all of the being adrenalized for three years,” Luhrmann jokes.
The Belmond connection, meanwhile, came about when Gary Franklin, Belmond’s senior vice president of trains and cruises, considered who his dream collaborators would be. Luhrmann’s name was the first that sprang to mind, so Franklin invited the filmmaker and his family for a trip on the Belmond-owned Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.
Luhrmann knew immediately that designing a train carriage would be the ultimate assignment. “It seemed like a dream, and I think that made it attractive, as that’s what we do anyway,” Luhrmann says. His hope is for his audience “to come into a space and to leave their lives behind and go on a journey, whether that’s through a play or a movie or a train. They should feel spiritually renewed, because they’re able to leave themselves and come back—hopefully having readjusted the energy that might be pulling them down. Which feels like a lot of verbiage to say: It was an easy yes.”
An easy yes, perhaps, but it’s difficult to fathom just how Luhrmann and Martin were able to fit this into their jam-packed schedules. On Monday, they helped oversee the creative direction of the Met Gala, and they are currently in the end stages of a years-long pre-production process for Luhrmann’s Joan of Arc biopic, which is set to begin filming later this year. “I will say that, even for someone who’s always a bit four points on the compass, I’m probably a little more stretched than usual,” Luhrmann says, with a chuckle.
As he explains, however, it’s exactly these sorts of side quests—or “adventures,” as he and Martin call them—that keep his creative juices flowing, inevitably feeding back into their next film project. “Whether that’s the hotel in Miami, or the little bar we’ve got downtown, or an election campaign—it’s always great to do something we haven’t done before.”
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Plus, there’s the fact that both Luhrmann and Martin are consummate hosts. Whether in Sydney or New York, they love throwing parties, or “soirées,” in Luhrmann’s words; on Monday night, they even hosted a post-Met Gala bash that saw him dancing into the wee hours. Now that Celia is ready to be unveiled, you can certainly expect a glittering dinner or two in celebration. “There is a bit of a coming-out party planned,” Luhrmann admits. “So fingers crossed we’ll be on the train, handing around cigars, very soon.”
Both are visibly excited to see the space come to life: Martin was able to take a journey on the train to test some of the design elements a few weeks earlier, and describes the experience as unexpectedly moving. “The car hasn’t been on the rails since 1972, so it was very emotional,” she says. “I was on the train for eight hours over two days, and the time just flew by. One minute we were leaving the station, and the next we were back—it just went in a puff of smoke.”
Having traveled on the British Pullman myself for an afternoon a few months back, I can confirm the experience really is magical—and in Luhrmann and Martin’s hands, it’s set to become that little bit more cinematic. “It really was just like doing a movie,” Luhrmann adds. “And I think the measure of whether it’s successful would be someone going on it and feeling like they’d actually stepped inside one of our movies and lost themselves in it.” A century after her name was in West End lights, Celia is ready to make a spellbinding return.
