Dornob | Design Ideas Daily

Car Crazy: House Built Around Views of Porsche

Posted: 30 Jun 2013 10:00 AM PDT

If you’re willing to spend over $84,000 on it, it’s probably safe to say that you really, really love your car. Enough, perhaps, to organize the design of your entire home around views of it, so you can maintain near-constant visual contact with your beloved automobile from every room. This home in Osaka by Kenji Yanagawa makes a Porsche 911 the focal point in a central garage.

Set back protectively from the street, the garage forms the bottom level of the home; the living spaces cantilever above the driveway. A glass wall gives the adjacent music room prime views of the Porsche. Climb the stairs and you’ll still be able to see it from the kitchen, and then through a glass cube floor in the living room.

Open all the way from the ground floor to a series of large skylights in the roof, the stairwell acts as an atrium, flooding the garage with natural light to show off the Porsche to its greatest potential. Each room in the house opens to this atrium so inhabitants can look straight down onto the car.

This wide-open plan even extends to the bathroom, where half-height walls retain a connection to the atrium, and large sliding glass doors open onto a roof terrace set away from the street-facing facade. This terrace, and the one below it that extends from the living room, is wrapped in a steel envelope that provides privacy from neighboring houses.