when the car moves upstairs, the garage becomes part of the home
how supercars are redefining domestic space
On the fifty-sixth floor of Porsche Design Tower Miami, a car might roll out of a glass elevator and park beside its owner’s apartment. The sixty-story tower was completed in Sunny Isles Beach in 2017, and was built around three car elevators (so-called Dezervator lifts) developed by Dezer Development.
A resident pulls up at ground level and sends the car upward through the tower’s core, where it reaches private parking attached to the home. A piece of infrastructure usually buried below grade has been pulled through the building and placed beside the living room.
Porsche Design Tower Miami, Florida | image © Porsche
While it’s likely that most of us don’t live with such an amenity, the concept of the sky garage is not exactly new. Selldorf Architects completed 200 Eleventh Avenue in New York in 2010 with private garages served by a car elevator, while Hamilton Scotts in Singapore followed in 2012 with elevated garages behind glass walls beside the apartments.
Porsche Design Tower Miami arrived after those experiments. Its contribution was to bind an existing spatial concept to an automotive name, and to turn the relationship between car and home into the central identity of the building.
Porsche Design Tower Miami, Florida | image © Porsche
the automotive world informs a building type
Bentley Residences Miami (see here) carries that model into a second tower by the same developer. Designed with Sieger Suarez Architects and scheduled for completion in 2027, the 61-story building uses four Dezervator lifts to bring cars directly to private garages holding up to four vehicles. A mechanism introduced with the Porsche tower has become transferable infrastructure.
Bentley Residences Miami, Florida | image © Bentley
Once the same device crosses brand lines, the shift to a new building type becomes even more clear. Parking moves out of the basement and into each unit, which thus changes the sequence of arrival and the organization of the plan. The automaker generally supplies a design language, while a developer and a team of architects turn it into buildable housing. This way the building can be presented as an extension of automotive design.
Bentley Residences Miami, Florida | floorplan © Bentley
when the car starts designing the section
Porsche Design Tower Bangkok (see here) pushes the translation much further. The 21-story project in Thonglor is organized around 22 duplex and quadplex residences, with a spiral vehicle ramp called The Loop rising through the center toward customizable garages known as Passion Spaces.
Its automated terrace doors take their cue from the opening mechanism of the 911 Targa roof, while an exposed X-Frame references the Mission R concept car. The building scales up automotive mechanisms into architectural ones, moving beyond surface resemblance toward the way parts open and move.
Porsche Design Tower Bangkok, Thailand | image © Porsche
interiors informed by automotive design logic
Meanwhile, Pagani Residences in North Bay Village and Aston Martin Residences Miami (see here) work through have a more tactile, human-scale approach. Aston Martin’s design team shaped shared interiors inside the completed 66-story Miami tower with carbon-fiber reception desks and leather door tabs, along with bespoke hardware like handles and number plinths.
Pagani Arte applies materials associated with the company’s hypercars to its residential interiors, pairing typical building materials like stone and wood with carbon fiber and aluminum. In both projects, the house becomes an enlarged field for textures that were first developed inside a vehicle cabin.
Pagani Residences, North Bay Village, Florida | image © Pagani Arte
the idea leaves the tower
Tierra Viva, a 53-villa development in the hills of Benahavís, Spain, brings the same thinking back to the scale of the detached house. Developed by DarGlobal with design input from Automobili Lamborghini, the project gives selected Painite villas a vehicle lift connecting both residential levels. The car can move vertically through the house and appear beside living spaces, turning a piece of parking equipment into a principal domestic feature.
These projects sit at the far edge of the housing market, and their cost allows experimental engineering to be absorbed with little concern for budget. Of course, this limits how directly this type of residence informs housing on the whole. Their extreme nature still makes a broader spatial shift easy to read. Circulation and display are being reorganized around a machine that once occupied a peripheral room, even the street. The garage was historically a buffer between street and house, and it’s now being pulled toward the center of domestic space.
Tierra Viva, Benahavís, Spain | image © Automobili Lamborghini
from residence to branded city
Mercedes-Benz Places expands the idea again by loosening the connection to the car itself. In Miami, JDS Development Group is developing a mixed-use complex with SHoP Architects and ODP, Woods Bagot on the interiors, and Field Operations on the landscape. Mercedes-Benz adds a broader design language across the residences and shared spaces, rather than organizing the building around the automobile as Porsche and Bentley do. But the project still marks another stage in the shift, as automotive identity begins to operate at the scale of architecture and urban space, even as its connection to the actual machine here is becoming more abstract.
Mercedes-Benz Places Miami, Florida | image © Mercedes-Benz
In Dubai, Mercedes-Benz Places Binghatti City (see here) pushes the name across a twelve-tower masterplan organized around a central park. At this scale, automotive identity operates as an organizing language for real estate even when a vehicle never enters the room. At the scale of a neighborhood, the carmaker supplies a design code and a marketing language, and architects and developers turn both into buildings and shared environments. And so, these projects can be useful beyond their status as luxury products.
The car has spent more than a century reshaping cities through road widths and parking rules. Now, at the most exclusive edge of housing, it’s moving inward. The old division between home and garage is thinning, and the car is being considered as one of the clients itself.
Mercedes-Benz Places Binghatti City, Dubai, UAE | image © Mercedes-Benz
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
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