Story audio is generated using AI
Her name was Celia. She was a 1920s showgirl with yellow feathers in her hair. Fresh off a West End run as a luminous Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a secret admirer gifts her a train carriage. Because gifts must have standout qualities and diamonds are, well, overdone.
That is the story Baz Luhrmann and his wife and long-time creative collaborator Catherine Martin embroidered into tasselled velvet banquettes, marquetry wall panels embellished with flowers, and enough crystal chandeliers to match the clinking of coupes of champagne. This is the cinematic and refined Belmond train carriage they have personified as the evanescent beauty called Celia. A perambulatory world where reality graciously makes way for celluloid dreams.
The carriage is a restored 1932 Pullman carriage reimagined as an intimate private world for only 12 guests. There is a cocktail bar, lounge, dining space and entertainment area, all wrapped inside a fever dream of 1930s glamour and Shakespearean fantasy.
Luhrmann could never design anything merely functional. This is the man who turned Paris into operatic delirium in Moulin Rouge! and transformed the Jazz Age into a glittering hallucination in The Great Gatsby. Yet it is Martin, the four-time Oscar-winning production and costume designer behind so much of Luhrmann’s visual universe, who gives Celia its emotional texture.
The Celia narrative is embedded in every detail. Purple-velvet seating curves beneath softly glowing glass ceilings. Handcrafted embroideries, bespoke British furniture and intricate wood inlays create the feeling of stepping onto a forgotten stage set.
Martin worked with artisans across England, including glassmakers, embroiderers and marquetry specialists, to bring the carriage to life piece by piece. Even the scent drifting through the space was custom-designed to evoke the invisible presence of Celia herself.
What makes the project so compelling is that it never collapses into nostalgia. Luhrmann and Martin understand glamour without story is simply decoration. The carriage works because it feels inhabited by fantasy. Watching the countryside slip past through the windows becomes cinematic in the truest sense, each landscape framed like a moving shot from one of Luhrmann’s films. Martin described the rectangular train window as “a profoundly filmic experience”.
In an era of frictionless travel and algorithmic efficiency, there is something magical about the slowness of it all. Celia belongs to a different imagination of luxury, rooted in atmosphere rather than speed. Cocktails arrive ceremoniously; dinner unfolds like a scene change, and by night the carriage transforms from refined dining salon into something moodier and more decadent, with music and performance woven into the experience.
Luhrmann and Martin have not merely designed a train carriage for Belmond. They have designed an escape hatch into fantasy itself.
From the June issue of Wanted, 2026
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