On the oceanfront stretch of Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, residents of the Porsche Design Tower don’t park their cars in a garage. Instead, the garage rides upstairs with them.
Residents pull their vehicles into a cylindrical glass elevator that lifts both the driver and the car more than 60 stories into the air. The elevator—or “Dezervator,” as the building’s developer, Gil Dezer, calls it—deposits the vehicle directly into a private sky garage attached to the apartment, where the car sits behind a glass wall like a display in an auto showroom, visible from the living room.
The 644-foot high-rise, whose 132 condos are priced as high as $47.5 million, was designed to embody the aesthetics of Porsche engineering: a sleek, metallic building whose curved glass balconies mirror the shape and aerodynamics of the iconic German sports car.
The Porsche Design Tower is part of a rapidly growing slice of the luxury real estate market, known as branded residences, apartment buildings designed in partnership with global luxury brands. It’s a strange development in modern real estate, where a new class of apartment buildings functions less like housing and more like 3D brand experiences.
