Jack Griffin, a former racecar driver, owns a double-size condominium in Carrollton, Texas, complete with a library, fully stocked wet bar and custom-designed floors.
The big-screen television on the main level is 50 inches. A bigger-screen television on the mezzanine level is 75. Placed precisely throughout are photos of his races, from Le Mans (France) to Daytona (Florida), along with a few family heirlooms.
Griffin, 81, doesn’t live in the condo, but 11 of his 12 Porsches do.
Even thinking about relegating square footage to a car is enough to make a New Yorker go mad. To anyone who engages in the 45-minute ritualistic hunt for a neighborhood parking spot, praying to the car gods that the fire hydrant at the end of the block is just the devil’s mirage, there is nothing more luxurious than an assigned parking spot.
But to a growing number of autophiles around the country, assigned parking is incomprehensibly basic.
The status spot is now a “car condo,” which is essentially a pied-à-terre for wheels and the people who love them. It’s part garage and part club, and developments for these condos are now all over the country.
“It’s a remote man cave, a second home away from home,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real estate consulting firm. “This is not just you park your car there and go back to your house. It’s a place to hang out in privacy from your own home.”
And while car condos are still “extremely niche,” Miller added, “we’re in an environment where it’s about acquiring other physical assets because of the wealth effect.” In other words, the ultrarich are making more and spending more.
Jon Summer, who owns Garaza Design in Scottsdale, Ariz., said his clients spend $400,000 to $1 million to customize their spaces. For “the first few garages we did,” he said, customers “would spend $50 to 100,000 on steel cabinetry.”
“Then,” he said, “it was, ‘Oh we need a mezzanine.’ Then ‘We need floors’ and ‘We need lifts.’”
At the Toy Barn in Scottsdale, he collaborated with Jaimee Rose Interiors to turn a car condo into a homage to Ralph Lauren.
It’s also about something money can’t buy: community. Griffin, the former racecar driver, said, “I know so many people my age who sit at home and watch ‘Gunsmoke’ all day long.”
He, by contrast, said he had become friendly with a retired Southwest Airlines pilot a few garages down and a well-known Texas rancher with 12 Corvettes. “We have something to get up in the morning for,” he said. “If someone doesn’t show up to the garage for a couple of weeks, we check up on them.”
Griffin owns Garages of America, which developed 14 stand-alone garages full of condos. He has started an in-person gathering called “Garages and Gearheads Getting Coffee,” named after Jerry Seinfeld’s series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.”
If the car-condo business is booming, it’s because the car craze has never been hotter. According to a study released in December by the Boston Consulting Group, the U.S. luxury and exotic car market is expected to nearly double to up to $215 billion from $110 billion in the next decade.
A 62-car condo garage called The Hangar in the Hamptons is scheduled to open next year, the first in the Hamptons. “It took five years to find the spot,” said Scott Cunningham, the Hangar’s founder and chief executive. “We love that area, but the issue was finding enough land that would allow us to build.”
In the end, he scored space near the Francis S. Gabreski Airport, a joint airstrip for military and private customers, in Southampton, N.Y., because the plane noise made it undesirable for potential homeowners (and more accommodating to things like car condos).
Cunningham would not reveal prices, but he said he had a list of more than 100 people interested in buying condos and expected to sell out before the building was completed. “Our owners don’t have what they call ‘price sensitivity,’” Cunningham said. “We want to be the Four Seasons, not the Holiday Inn.”
Some car lovers laugh at the over-the-top trend. “These condos are just an extension of the competition guys have every time they get together,” joked Tom Yang, a former audio engineer for the “Late Show With David Letterman” who now restores Ferraris in Hudson, N.Y. “It’s like the arms race.”
The former roller rink he owned next door to his shop will open on Sept. 1 as Hudson Valley Car Storage, a $400-a-month luxury garage — decidedly not condos. As he put it, “I want to do stuff with cars — not be a real estate developer.”
