The Fabric That Lined the Titanic’s Dining Room Now Lines a Car Built for 2035

Bentley marked its hundredth year with a concept car built to a single condition: nothing went into the cabin unless it could exist by 2035. Meeting that brief meant calling on a Suffolk mill that once dressed the Titanic’s dining room, an Italian start-up turning wine waste into leather, and the last crystal house in Britain still working from raw sand.

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Bentley EXP 100 GT: a concept car built for 2035

Bentley turned one hundred on 10 July 2019. It marked the occasion not with an anniversary edition of an existing model, but with a concept car that looked past the century behind it and set a condition for the decade and a half ahead: the EXP 100 GT, unveiled at the company’s home in Crewe, was built around a rule that Bentley’s engineering director set for the design team before a single material was chosen. If it could not exist, at scale, by 2035, it was not going in the car.

That constraint, enforced by Brett Boydell, Bentley’s Head of Interior Design, turned what could have been a routine materials showcase into something closer to a public audit of what British and European craft could actually deliver against a sustainability brief. Bentley’s answer was to go back to the workshops that already do this for a living. One of them had been weaving the same kind of damask for longer than Bentley has been making cars.

The rule that shaped everything

“Everything had to have a sustainable approach and an engineering roadmap to support it,” Boydell has said of the project. “Our engineering director said, if we can’t make that by 2035, it’s not going in.”

That line is the argument the rest of the car has to answer to. Under Stefan Sielaff, Bentley’s Director of Design, and John Paul Gregory, Head of Exterior Design, the EXP 100 GT took the proportions of a historic Bentley grand tourer and stretched them into something built for an electric, largely autonomous decade: 5.8 metres long, nearly 2.4 metres wide, with doors two metres across that pivot outward and upward rather than swinging on a hinge. The rear haunch is a direct quote from the R-Type Continental, Bentley’s defining post-war grand tourer, and the round headlights nod to the supercharged Blower Bentleys of the 1920s. The centenary is legible in the silhouette. The brief that governed everything inside it looked the other way, at 2035.

A Suffolk mill that outlasted the ship it once dressed

The cabin’s floor, door linings and bulkhead are lined in a bespoke cotton damask from Gainsborough, the weaving house based in Sudbury, Suffolk. Gainsborough was founded in 1903 by Reginald Warner, and in that same founding year it wove a custom baroque damask for the first-class dining saloon of the RMS Titanic. It has held a Royal Warrant since 1981, supplying fabric to Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Kensington Palace, and it keeps an archive of more than 7,000 designs running back to the fifteenth century. Its usual material is silk. For Bentley, it wove in cotton instead, a deliberate choice for a fabric that has to survive a car’s temperature swings and a century’s worth of trim tolerances rather than a formal dining room.

Dominique Caplan, Gainsborough’s Head of Design, worked directly with Bentley’s Colour and Trim department to develop six individual panels, dyed and hand-woven so that a single ombre gradient, built from five colours drawn from Bentley’s own palette, would flow continuously across the floor, the doors and the bulkhead. “Each panel was a bespoke piece,” Caplan has said, “engineered so that the pattern and gradation would flow seamlessly.” The organic pattern was designed to shift as light crosses the interplay of warp and weft threads, so the trim reads differently depending on where the light in the cabin is coming from.

The embroidery that fuses two materials into one

The damask does not simply sit alongside the car’s wood trim. Along the doors, it is physically joined to it by Hand & Lock, the London embroidery house that has been working since the late eighteenth century and now holds more than two hundred and fifty years of continuous practice. Under Jessica Pile, its production director, the studio used trapunto, a raised quilting technique developed in fourteenth-century Sicily, to stitch the Gainsborough damask to the car’s ancient wood veneer along a single seam. The finished pattern is a diamond that loosens into organic, cell-like shapes as it runs the length of the door, the same motif that reappears later in the shaping of the seat backs.

Wood pulled from a bog, and copper poured into its cracks

That veneer is subfossil oak, roughly five thousand years old, recovered from British peat bogs by Adamson and Low, a Kent-based specialist in what is sometimes called bog oak. Buried and waterlogged for millennia, the wood darkens and its grain opens into fine natural cracks as it slowly mineralises. Rather than filling those cracks to hide them, Bentley’s designers had them inlaid with recycled copper, in a technique borrowed directly from the Japanese practice of kintsugi, where a repair is left visible and treated as decoration rather than disguised. Bentley calls the finished material Copper Infused Riverwood. It is the oldest material in any Bentley interior, set inside a car designed to describe the marque’s next fifteen years.

Leather that never came from an animal

The seats mix three approaches to leather, only two of which involve hide. Vegea, an Italian company, supplied a bio-based leather alternative made almost entirely from the by-products of wine production: grape skins, stalks and seeds left over after pressing, which would otherwise be discarded. It appears throughout the seating alongside more conventional materials from two Scottish tanneries. The Scottish Leather Group produced soft aniline hides, dyed with soluble dyes that leave the leather’s natural marks and imperfections visible rather than polishing them out. Bridge of Weir developed a nubuck with a hand-sprayed, hand-buffed copper-metallic finish, echoing the copper inlay in the wood trim two materials away.

The seats themselves are built on aluminium frames reinforced with carbon fibre and fitted with biometric sensors. Their backs use an adaptive support structure patterned on the same organic cell shapes that run through the door embroidery, so a detail that starts as decoration on the door reappears as engineering in the seat. Two additional seats are built into the rear bulkhead, with headrests and squabs that deploy only when needed.

A carpet woven the old way, and paint made from rice husks

Underfoot, Grosvenor Wilton wove an exclusive ombre wool carpet using electronic jacquard looms alongside its long-established heritage weaving methods. The wool is entirely British-farmed. “Being one of the only carpet brands to make British-made one hundred per cent wool carpets,” said Charles Annable, the company’s managing director, “Grosvenor Wilton was a clear choice.” Outside the cabin, the car’s exterior paint uses a pigment drawn from recycled rice husk ash, a by-product of processing that would otherwise go to landfill, applied over a body built from lightweight aluminium and carbon fibre.

Crystal, light and an assistant that reads a pulse

The EXP 100 GT’s AI system, which Bentley calls the Personal Assistant, is made physically present in the cabin through hand-blown crystal centrepieces from Cumbria Crystal, the last remaining crystal house in Britain still producing glass from raw sand through to a finished piece. Each centrepiece is blown in three layers and lights up when the assistant is activated by touch or by hand gesture. Around it, the lighting engineer and designer Moritz Waldemeyer built a programmable three-dimensional LED system running more than ten thousand individual points of light through the cabin.

The assistant itself runs four modes, named Capture, Re-Live, Enhance and Cocoon, and draws on biometric readings, monitoring occupants’ temperature, position, eye and head movement and blood pressure, to adjust the cabin, including the opacity of the glass and the operation of an air purification system. The car can be driven manually or given over entirely to autonomous control. Bentley’s stated figures for the electric powertrain are equally direct about the fifteen-year horizon it was designed against: four motors, 0 to 60mph in under 2.5 seconds, a top speed of 186mph, 1,500 newton metres of torque, a battery with five times the energy density of current technology, and an 80 per cent charge in fifteen minutes.

Where the car went next

The EXP 100 GT has not gone into production and was never intended to. It remains a single design study, built to answer the question of what a Bentley grand tourer could be in 2035 rather than to preview a model for sale. In January 2020, six months after its unveiling, it was named Most Beautiful Concept Car of the Year at the thirty-fifth Festival Automobile International in Paris, chosen unanimously by a jury of designers, and was exhibited at the Hôtel des Invalides, the UNESCO World Heritage site on the banks of the Seine, for the duration of the festival.

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Final thoughts

A centenary concept car invites an obvious kind of story: a hundred years of coachbuilding, condensed into one showpiece. The EXP 100 GT tells a different one. It looks backward only in its proportions, the R-Type haunch and the Blower headlights, and everywhere else it is answering to a date fifteen years in its future. What makes that brief credible rather than theoretical is the roll call of workshops Bentley called on to meet it, several of which have been solving exactly this kind of problem, in exactly this kind of material, for far longer than Bentley has existed, in the same tradition of bespoke craft behind Rolls-Royce’s own gallery commissions for the Phantom. A mill that dressed the Titanic in its opening year now lines a car designed for 2035. That is less a coincidence than a demonstration of what British and European craft can still do when a brief actually asks it to.