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Wheels
We tapped the fashion
crowd for their most-
prized whips.Steven Harris’s design for a San Diego
garage includes an elevator that
moves vintage cars to the lower level.TOMMY HILFIGER
This 1989 Jeep Grand
Wagoneer is a favorite
from his years of collecting.
jeep.comInfinity 24-gauge-
steel door by Lux
Garage Doors.DIANE VON
FURSTENBERG
Second to her iconic wrap
dresses, this dark green
Bentley Mulsanne has
become von Furstenberg’s
signature.
bentleymotors.comPETER MARINO
Among his many bikes,
Marino usually has
his gloves on this mighty
KTM 1290 Super Duke R,
aptly dubbed the Beast.
ktm.comHarris counts numerous collectors among
his clients, including one in San Diego who
now has a concrete garage with porthole
windows and a vehicle turntable concealed
beneath his house.
But if there is an additional intersecting
circle in the diagram described by Har-
ris, who has designed boutiques for Dolce
& Gabbana and Barneys New York, it is
fashion—a concept understood by such
car enthusiasts as Ralph Lauren, Tommy
Hilfiger, and Nicola Bulgari. After all,
what you drive is sometimes as import-
ant as what you wear. “I often choose cars
for my clients to go with the house,” says
Harris, citing a canary-yellow Land Rover
Defender for a horse farm in New Jersey
and the Aston Martin V8 Vantage coupe
for a modernist compound on New York’s
Long Island.
At Chanel Ginza, in Japan, the architect
Peter Marino designed a garage entrance as
captivating as the store, with black-bronze
walls, large screens, and a lift that lowers
cars underground. “It’s an immersive expe-
rience, with a beautiful marble path into the
store from the garage,” says Marino, noting
that his private clients often desire a similar
sense of arrival. “Most of them put a lot of
effort into their garages because they have
beautiful cars; they
realize it’s part of the
experience of enter-
ing their home.” That
has resulted in garages
with cedar and stone
walls, dramatically
lit ceilings, and even
Warhol cow prints.
Harris and Marino
follow in the foot-
steps of Le Corbusier,who also recognized the importance of the
garage a century ago. The father of modern
architecture based the ground floor of his
iconic Villa Savoye on the turning radius of
a car, so that vehicles could slip underneath
it to reach the integrated garage. But garages
aren’t just for modernists. “We’ve built
garages that look like barns,” says architect
Cynthia Filkoff, citing a recent 16-car garage
in Sharon, Connecticut, that resembles an
aged bank barn but has air-conditioned
spaces with a lift, car wash, and television.
Nor are upscale garages reserved exclu-
sively for collectors. Designer Joe Nahem
conceived a garage for his East Hampton
home with mahogany louvers and a green
roof. For his brother, Nahem split a two-car
unit down the middle and transformed half
into a poolhouse with surf boards on a rack.
Concrete floors still reign supreme, but
Harris says some clients are now choosing
large porcelain slabs for easier cleanup,
“because virtually all important cars leak
something.” Los Angeles designer Oliver M.
Furth, meanwhile, has been coating garage
floors with epoxy in vivid colors so they can
serve as multifunctional studios.
Sometimes, it’s even difficult to differ-
entiate the garage from the house. In Aus-
tin, Texas, architect Sam Burch recently
designed a two-story steel-and-glass struc-
ture that could easily pass for a dream
home, complete with a lounge, media room,
and home office. “It was inspired by the
garage in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” says
David Dalgleish, the contractor who built it.
Of course, not every garage has to be
so extravagant. Even Marino, a motor-
cycle aficionado, admits to storing his
steeds in a basic space: “It’s a little wood
shack-let—embarrassing—with rakes and
gas cans. It’s a real guy’s garage.” ◾