The Rolls-Royce Fabergé Egg That Carries a Century-Old Secret

Craft & Materials · London

Reading Time: 8 minutes

In 2018, Rolls-Royce and Fabergé built a jewelled egg around the Spirit of Ecstasy, the car mascot whose model, Eleanor Thornton, spent over a decade keeping a secret. The object borrows two houses’ founding stories at once: an Imperial craft tradition broken by revolution, and a hood ornament with a hidden romance folded into its own design. Both histories turn on the same idea, something concealed until a mechanism releases it, which is exactly how the egg itself works.

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Introduction

The Spirit of Ecstasy Fabergé Egg stands 160mm tall and weighs 400g, small enough to hold in two hands and dense enough that you notice the weight immediately. An 18 carat white gold base, engine turned and hand engraved beneath a purple enamel guilloché finish, carries rose gold boughs set with nearly ten carats of round white diamonds and more than 390 carats of natural amethyst, chosen specifically for its depth of colour. A discreet lever at the base of the stand releases the boughs, which part to reveal a frosted rock crystal sculpture of the Spirit of Ecstasy, hand carved in miniature, sitting inside. Rolls-Royce and Fabergé unveiled it at Rolls-Royce’s Goodwood headquarters on 23 October 2018, then showed it briefly at Fabergé’s Mayfair boutique that December, before it returned to the private collector who had commissioned it.

Most of the coverage that followed treated the object as a carat count, a materials list dressed up as a headline. That misses what makes it interesting. Rolls-Royce and Fabergé did not simply lend each other a logo. They built a single object around the one thing their two founding stories already had in common: a history that had to be hidden before it could be revealed. Understanding that argument means going back to where the mascot on the bonnet actually came from.

A mascot with a secret already inside it

Charles Sykes, a sculptor trained at the Royal College of Art, was commissioned in February 1911 by Claude Johnson, Rolls-Royce’s managing director, to design a dignified mascot for the marque’s cars after owners had taken to fitting their own, sometimes inappropriate, ornaments to the bonnet. Johnson asked for something that conveyed “the spirit of the Rolls-Royce, namely, speed with silence, absence of vibration, the mysterious harnessing of great energy.” Sykes delivered a graceful figure with arms swept back like wings, and it has stood on the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce since.

What Johnson did not know, or at least did not say, is that Sykes was not starting from nothing. Two years earlier, in 1909, he had sculpted a private figure called The Whisper, one finger raised to her lips, modelled on Eleanor Thornton, a secretary at The Car Illustrated magazine. Thornton and John Montagu, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, had been in a relationship since 1902, one he could not acknowledge because he was already married and she held a lower social position; the two kept it hidden from all but a small circle for more than a decade. Sykes adapted The Whisper into the commercial Spirit of Ecstasy, softening the secrecy of the raised finger into the outstretched arms of a figure in motion, but the model underneath was the same woman. Thornton died on 30 December 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed the SS Persia south of Crete; Montagu survived several days adrift before he was rescued. The mascot on every Rolls-Royce built since 1911 is, formally, a portrait of a secret its own creator only partly disguised.

An Imperial tradition built on concealment

Fabergé’s own history runs on the same mechanism. Peter Carl Fabergé delivered the first in what became a standing Easter commission in 1885, when Tsar Alexander III ordered an egg for his wife, the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna. The result, now known as the First Hen Egg, looks from the outside like a plain white enamelled egg. It opens on a hidden bayonet fitting to reveal a matte gold yolk; the yolk opens to reveal a small gold hen with ruby eyes; the hen’s tail feathers hinge open to reveal a diamond replica of the Imperial crown and a tiny ruby pendant, both since lost. Alexander III was pleased enough to order a new egg every year after, and the tradition ran to more than fifty Imperial eggs before the 1917 revolution ended it, nationalising Fabergé’s assets and sending the family into exile.

The name survived the century that followed in various commercial hands before the rebuilt house returned to making objects on that original scale. In 2015, its Pearl Egg became the first work classified as “Imperial Class” since 1917, a category the house itself defines by the ambition and complexity of the craft rather than by any formal Romanov connection. The Spirit of Ecstasy Egg, unveiled three years later, became only the second. Both are private commissions rather than museum pieces, which is itself a return to form: the original Imperial eggs were gifts within a family, not public exhibits, and it took the 1917 confiscation to put most of the surviving ones behind glass.

How the egg was made

The design began at Rolls-Royce, where Stefan Monro and Alex Innes, both from the marque’s bespoke design studio, produced the initial sketches before sending them to Fabergé. Liisa Talgren, Fabergé’s lead designer, developed those sketches into a workable concept, and Paul Jones, the workmaster who carried it through to completion, spent more than two years combining computer aided design and micro engineering with the hand goldsmithing that Fabergé’s reputation was built on in the first place. Rolls-Royce has described the lever mechanism that opens the boughs as probably the most complicated opening of any Fabergé egg made to date, which is a meaningful claim given the First Hen Egg’s own three stage reveal.

Innes, now head of Rolls-Royce’s coachbuild design studio, has described the department’s working method as closer to commissioning architecture than buying a car: understanding the client’s ambitions comes before any sketch is drawn, and the goal is restraint rather than accumulated ornament. That same logic shows in the egg. Nothing about its exterior announces what is inside. The purple guilloché base and rose gold boughs read as complete on their own, and the crystal figurine only appears once the patron chooses to release it, which is precisely the design principle Sykes applied when he folded a private figure into a public mascot more than a century earlier.

A private commission, not a museum piece

The egg was made for what Rolls-Royce has described only as a discerning collector of both marques, whose identity has not been made public. That is consistent with how the house has always worked: Fabergé’s Imperial eggs were gifts inside one family before political upheaval turned them into public artefacts, and this commission has stayed exactly what it was built to be, an object owned and used privately rather than displayed. Its month at the Mayfair boutique was the exception rather than the rule, a chance for two design houses to be seen together once before the piece went back into private hands.

That distinction matters for how the object should be read now. It was never intended to join a museum collection or a public archive the way the surviving Imperial eggs eventually did. It exists instead as proof of what both houses’ bespoke divisions are actually for, work commissioned by one patron, for one patron, that happens to be significant enough to draw attention regardless.

What has changed since 2018

Fabergé itself has changed hands since the egg was made. Gemfields, the coloured gemstone mining company that had owned Fabergé for roughly a decade, sold the brand in August 2025 to SMG Capital, a US investment firm led by Sergei Mosunov, for $50 million, structured as $45 million upfront plus royalty payments tied to future revenue. Gemfields had opened a strategic review after difficulties that began in late 2024, including a suspension of ruby mining in Mozambique during a period of political unrest there, and the sale was part of an effort to strengthen its balance sheet. Mosunov has said Fabergé will continue to focus on jewellery, accessories and timepieces, maintaining the house’s history while expanding its international presence. The Spirit of Ecstasy Egg predates that sale by seven years, but it was made under the ownership that has now ended, which places it at the close of one chapter in Fabergé’s own long history of changing hands rather than at the start of a new one.

What the design argument actually is

Put the two histories side by side and the egg stops being a cross branding exercise and becomes something more specific: an object that deliberately repeats the shape of both houses’ origin stories. Fabergé’s first commission opened in three concealed stages to reveal a hidden crown. Rolls-Royce’s mascot began as a private tribute to a hidden relationship before it became a public emblem. The Spirit of Ecstasy Egg does both at once, hiding its own figurine behind a lever mechanism that has to be worked to release it, and using that mechanism to reveal a mascot whose own history was, for over a century, a secret that was only partly told. The craftsmanship is the headline fact. The choice of what to hide inside it is the actual argument.

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Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Objects built to advertise two luxury houses at once usually settle for shared materials and a joint press release. This one is built around a shared idea instead: that the most valuable thing a maker can hide inside a piece of work is a story that took a hundred years to tell properly. The Spirit of Ecstasy Egg does not explain that story anywhere on its surface. It simply repeats the same act of concealment that both of its parent histories were already built on, and lets the lever do the rest.

Rolls-Royce’s more recent Bespoke commissions, including a haute couture collaboration with Iris van Herpen and a hand-painted Dunhuang-inspired Gallery artwork, are covered separately: The Dashboard That Became a Gallery.