Is there anything more British than a green Land Rover upholstered in Harris Tweed? You’d forgive me, then, for being surprised when I spotted such a vehicle parked in a sleepy town in Virginia, only this one looked better than anything the Rover Group ever rolled off its factory floor.
While parts of the Old Dominion often mimic England, from foxhunting attire to “pubs” serving a disappointing rendition of bangers and mash, it’s never done quite properly. But this car, with its luxurious modifications, was righter than right. It looked like it had taken a wrong turn out of a country estate in Kent and somehow ended up across the pond.
It turns out that this particular Land Rover was the work of a man called Bill Desrosiers, the 37-year-old founder of the boutique Land Rover restoration business Commonwealth Classics, in Marshall, Virginia. Desrosiers, who grew up 40 minutes away in Fairfax, says the town is perfect for his line of work because it has “one traffic light, two classic-car dealerships, and five gas stations.” (It also has what Desrosiers believes is the best burger in northern Virginia, a few doors down at Field & Main.)
Commonwealth Classics occupies half of a car-lover’s dream building; the other half houses a storage facility full of Porsches and classic American muscle cars. Up front, there’s a sort of idealized men’s-club living room, with leather couches, the skull of a bull (a gift from a customer who had been ordered by his girlfriend to get it out of the house), and an assortment of coffee-table books. Bookshelves and drawers filled with swatches of sample Italian leathers and fabrics ring the seating area. This walk-in mood board is where you come in, sit down with Desrosiers, and design your off-roading, British country dream car.
Commonwealth Classics restores about 15 Rovers a year on average. Orders start around $100,000 and top out around $200,000, depending on the model and modifications. Special woven leather imported from Europe, for example, could cost $20,000 to $30,000 alone. Yet Commonwealth is a relative bargain compared with more established outfits specializing in “resto mods” (that is, customized classic cars fitted with modern comforts and more reliable engines), such as Icon, in Los Angeles.
Desrosiers says the town is perfect for his line of work because it has “one traffic light, two classic-car dealerships, and five gas stations.”
The growing popularity of resto mods has sparked an explosion of custom shops ready to shoehorn a big new engine and some leather seats into a vintage Wagoneer and sell it to a clientele hungry for big classic cars that can go off-road—far enough for an Instagram shoot, at least. What sets Commonwealth’s work apart from the rest is its focus on quality and its distinctive interiors.
Desrosiers is no mechanic. “I leave that to the professionals,” he says. After high school, he enrolled in architecture school, but dropped out due to poor arithmetic skills, graduating instead with a B.S. in business management. Desrosiers wound up, like so many in northern Virginia, as a government employee, doing logistics on aircraft carriers, Ohio-class submarines, and weapon systems for the U.S. Navy. But when a friend moved to Spain, a country crawling with right-hand-drive Land Rovers and Range Rovers, his early love of cars and design was re-awakened, and they began importing them to the U.S.
“I started importing and working on British-style cars for a few reasons,” Desrosiers says. “The early-1970s trucks I began working with are painfully simple to operate and maintain. They’re also the iconic Lawrence of Arabia–style trucks which the later Defenders worked so hard to emulate, despite their steady march upmarket.”
Although his path to designing classic cars was a winding one, Desrosiers credits his past, particularly his flirtation with architecture, as integral to what he does now. “The part I love most about my job,” Desrosiers tells me, “is how somebody can walk in with no idea what they want and leave with a vision.”
“We could start with just a shade of green, and then from there it’s like, What are we doing for leather on the inside?” he says. “Do you want it to be comfortable? Utilitarian? Maybe it’s something that you want to hand down to your kids. So, in that case, let’s forget about the custom high-end stuff and focus on the industrial processes that preserve the truck for a couple of decades.” Right now, Desrosiers is working on a few trucks for Shawn Stussy, the founder of the Stüssy clothing company.
So, what does a man living all men’s car dreams drive himself? Most of the time, a blue ’91 Defender 110. But Desrosiers also has a 1993 Toyota Land Cruiser in his driveway that’s as “resilient and durable as they come.” And the European early-90s diesel two-door Discovery is on his “nerdy truck wish list.”
Kara Kennedy is a Washington, D.C.–based freelance writer