When You Truly Love Your Porsche Collection, You Build a House For It

Joerg Ineichen is a family therapist based in San Diego, California. He is also a passionate car collector, with a very soft spot for vintage Porsches. As of some years ago, he is also the owner of a new, beautiful house that’s been built around his Porsche collection.

Among car collectors, those that build houses around or for their collections are only a handful, for the very obvious reasons: they must be loaded enough to be able to afford pursuing their hobby and, just as importantly, to spend extra on a specially built house. When their special projects come out as tastefully as this one, a round of applause is well deserved.

September is autoevolution’s Porsche Month and we’re celebrating today with that round of applause for Ineichen. The idea to build a family home around a garage that houses cars seems immature and probably ridiculous to anyone but a true car enthusiast, but this project is done in excellent taste.

Ineichen has Steven Harris to thank for that. The New York-based architect, through his firm Steven Harris Architects LLP, was commissioned with the project that was officially unveiled to the world in 2017. Harris himself is a Porsche collector (he has over 30 Porsches) and racer, and he was approached precisely for this reason: you can’t built a house for Porsches if you don’t share the same passion.

The result is a tiny house (*compared to other similarly-priced mansions) that serves almost like an appendage to the Porsche garage. It actually has two garages, totaling the same floor surface as the house: 2,500 square feet for the garages, 2,500 square feet (232 square meters) for the home. One garage sitting up front is for the “everyday” cars Ineichen drives: a 2017 Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro, and a 2006 Jeep Wrangler at the time when the house was first presented to the public via a feature in Esquire.

The real gem is the underground garage on top of which the two-story house sits. It’s accessible through a car elevator from street level, and is home to the entire Porsche collection, which includes a red 1992 964 RS, a blue 1957 Speedster and a silver 2004 Carrera GT.

You can peer into this secret storeroom from inside the house. You can ride down to check it in person. You can access it from inside the house through what looks like a tunnel. The house hides it and protects it, enveloping it from all sides.

This being a private residence, Harris never disclosed too many details about it, but he did say this: he’d always wanted to build a small house for a huge garage, and the fact that the garage happened to be stacked with Porsches added to the fun of it. A beautiful detail to the storeroom is a window-dotted wall at one end, through which you can look out on the city beyond.

“The house had to be understated,” Ineichen agreed. Understated, but not uncomfortable or any less elegant because of it. There’s a lap pool overlooking the office, an open-plan kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, and three bedrooms with ensuites upstairs. You have to walk through a sizable garden to get from the front gate to the front door, and this was on purpose: Harris wanted guests to be able to take in the beauty of the garden before they gained access inside.

Among his many projects along the years, including remodeling the Barneys stores in NYC and Beverly Hills, this was “a relative labor of love” for Harris. “Like me, [Ineichen] has only one car with four doors,” he explains.

Kindred Porsche-loving spirits also share a love for understated interiors and gorgeous garages.