Before Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza embarked on his first African expedition in the late nineteenth century, he asked a trunk-maker named Louis Vuitton to design an extra-long foldout bed to ensure restful nights on his journey. One hundred years later, the luxury-luggage house still customizes gear that makes life on the road less like life on the road.
More distinctive than the oft-knocked-off bags on Canal Street are the specialized pieces to carry all of your goods and chattels, from backgammon sets, architectural tools, stereo equipment, and computers to wardrobes, safes, and even collapsible desks. The only criteria—strictly enforced to honor the original spirit of the 150-year-old company—are that the item is portable and that its raison d'être is transport. "We are in the business of movement," says Patrick-Louis Vuitton, a fifth-generation member of the founding family who oversees all of LV's custom projects. "A special order is a compromise between desires and needs from the client and our aesthetic and technical requirements."
Louis Vuitton fills 450 off-the-menu orders each year from its workshop in Asnières, France, a metal-and-glass space that's like a Santa's workshop for the well-accoutred. Once a client has expressed his vision—as well as the travel conditions and hazards that his piece must endure—the product slowly takes shape through stages of detailed sketches and prototypes. This process can take four or five months (but no more than eight, as a policy), and it reflects LV's mastery of both old-world craftsmanship and technological trends in travelware. And in an era of mass production, Patrick-Louis maintains a personal touch by assigning as few as one worker to each custom item to see it through from the first stitches to the final product. Price is determined by size, materials (e.g., crocodile versus, say, Epi leather), and the overall complexity of the piece: A chess set, for example, made of inlaid lacquered wood, Madagascar-ebony-and-maple pieces, and a russet leather case costs around $21,000.
Patrick-Louis calls his clients "aesthetes of travel" who are on the road 100 to 200 days per year, but he's mum about who's ordered what—and rightfully so, as the custom-order paperwork promises confidentiality. But if you're desperate for inspiration, LV's PR department was willing to provide a few semi-anonymous precedents. There's the European president who ordered a small case with just two compartments—for a watch and a bottle of cognac—which he gifted to an Asian head of state; the CEO who ordered 20 differently lined valet boxes (one for each member of his executive board); the Saudi prince who ordered a travel case to protect his expensive hookah; and the American businessman who ordered a Taïga Ardoise leather bar trunk outfitted with enough compartments to turn the mildest of picnics into an all-day rager—it stows a bottle of champagne, two flutes, a whiskey decanter, four glasses, an ice bucket, and a full cabinet of other bar equipment. Even men of the cloth have exercised their right: In the 1920s a French priest—apparently also something of a paleontologist—requested a special altar trunk so that he could give Mass during an archaeological dig in the desert.
