Belmond Turns a 1932 Railcar Into an Art Deco Fantasy
Belmond is about to send a 1932 private dining car back onto the rails, but not in anything like its original form. On May 15, the company will debut Celia on the British Pullman, with an interior conceived by film director Baz Luhrmann and production designer Catherine Martin. The carriage seats 12, is offered only for exclusive-use bookings, and starts at £15,000.
The project sits somewhere between luxury travel and staged fiction. Luhrmann and Martin have built a backstory around Celia, imagining her as a 1930s Shakespearean actress whose performance as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired the railcar she later owned. That invented narrative is matched by an interior that leans hard into Art Deco: burl veneers, marquetry, stained glass, mosaic, and a saturated red palette that has become one of the couple’s visual signatures.
The effect is less a conventional dining car than a carefully composed environment, one that treats the journey itself as part of the experience. Luhrmann has described the ride as a passage into another world, where guests become part of a story unfolding as the train moves through the countryside.
Celia will run from Victoria Station to destinations including Bath, Bletchley Park, Chatsworth, and Whitstable. The route extends Belmond’s long-running interest in turning heritage rail into a platform for design-led spectacle. Since its acquisition by LVMH, the company has also enlisted Wes Anderson to shape the 1951 parlour car Cygnus and unveiled L’Observatoire, a former sleeping car on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express designed by JR.
The result is a clear statement of intent: Belmond is not simply preserving historic rail travel, but using it as a canvas for contemporary cultural production. In that sense, Celia is as much a conceptual artwork as a carriage — one that happens to move from station to station.
