Imagine driving your supercar right into your apartment, and leaving it parked there. For uber-rich car collectors, this is a reality at the new Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Miami.
The luxury tower has introduced the concept of “sky garages:” high-rise parking spaces located either adjacent to the living space, or one story below the home accessible via an internal staircase.
Automobiles are transported to the condos, which are priced between $15,000 and $25,000 per square meter, via dedicated car elevators.
“Unit owners can be driving any car,” says Gil Dezer, of Miami-based Dezer Development, which built the tower. “They come into the elevator, up to the unit, nobody bothers them. You don’t need to have a valet, you don’t have paparazzi taking pictures … that’s our customer base and our clients.”
Other luxury mod-cons include private swimming pools and summer kitchens on every balcony, a golf simulator and race-car simulator, a spa and a hair salon.
Living the high life
The 196-meter (644 feet) high Porsche Design Tower was unveiled in January, and is a collaboration between the luxury German car manufacturer and Dezer Development. Known for its branded buildings, Dezer has built six towers with the Trump Organization in Sunny Isles Beach – and in 2019 will complete luxury condos with designer furniture brand Armani/Casa, also in the same city.
“We sat down and said, ‘Well, what does Porsche design really have to do with real estate?’” says Dezer. “In the car world, we felt there was always a need for sleeping among your cars … (So) we came up with the concept of making the building about the automobile, and for the car enthusiast.”
The patented technology behind the car elevator – dubbed the “Dezervator” – allows drivers to be seated inside the vehicle during the elevator ride, something that existing technologies didn’t offer.
The “Dezervator” can whisk a driver and their car to any apartment in the tower in 75 seconds.
Art on wheels
By February, all but five of the 132 residences at the 60-story Porsche Design Tower had been snapped up.
The condos range in size between 4,252 and 16,915 square feet (395 to 1,571 square meters). Each apartment has between two to four parking spaces, and 80 of them feature parking adjacent to the living space. A standard two-car garage takes up 525 square feet (48 square meters).
Two four-story penthouses covering 20,000 square feet (1,858 square meters), priced at $32.5 million each, take up the top floors. Both properties have two private swimming pools, rooftops with all-encompassing views of Miami and their own “car gallery” with 11 parking spaces over 2,220 square feet (206 square meters).
While the car facilities inside the Porsche Design Tower are a big draw for residents, the tower was designed to bring all the comforts of a “typical single family home” in a high-rise setting.
Juan Pablo Verdiquio, a resident who lives in a 5,166-square-feet (480-square-meter) unit with his wife and two children, has a supercar collection that includes a Porsche, a Ferrari, and a Maserati.
“There’s nothing as big as this in Miami, in the sense of the size of the units,” Verdiquio says. “For us as a family … we like the idea of having the closest thing to a house on the beach.”
Residents are showing off their cars as a private art collection, Dezer explains.
“There are people who collect art and there are people who view automobiles as art,” he says. “This was a way to have your artistic automobile displayed in your living room.”