Daily Slideshow: A House Designed and Built Around Porsche
Joerg Ineichen and Steven Harris might be thousands of miles apart, but they share a singular obsession: Porsche. This fascination with the luxury brand brought them together to construct a house dedicated to showcasing various vintage cars.
The Men and the House
To begin, Joerg Ineichen is a family therapist in San Diego and a collector of vintage Porsches who likes to drive what he collects. “The idea of having them close is very special,” says Ineichen and to realize this idea, he turned to an architect who really got his obsession.
“I’ve always wanted to design a little house with a big garage,” Steven Harris says of the two-story home he created for Ineichen. Harris, like Ineichen, is a collector of vintage Porsches (he has about 30, scattered from Denver to Dubrovnik).
At 2,500 square feet, it’s modest by today’s standards, though the garages (yes, plural) are anything but— they, too, total 2,500 square feet.
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A Closer Look
In addition to the usual street front garage, which houses Ineichen’s “everyday” wheels (a 2017 Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro and a 2006 Jeep Wrangler), a much larger garage one level below the house (reached from the street by a car elevator) acts as a kind of secret storeroom for his collection of Porsches. It includes, among others, a blue 1957 Speedster, a 1992 964 RS in Rubystone red, and a silver 2004 Carrera GT.
This garage— which has a back wall dotted with round windows that both allow in daylight and showcase a view of the city beyond—is as sleek as the house that sits above it and, for that matter, the classic cars within it.
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On the Outside
It’s meant to be used as well. Ineichen wanted a house where he could entertain friends and family, and where he could take advantage of San Diego’s indoor/outdoor lifestyle.
From the street, those passing by will note its stucco wall, spanning the width of the lot, punctuated by a simple entrance gate.
The house (with the larger garage beneath it) sits at the back of the property, separated from the gate by a garden that has a 75-foot lap pool along one side. “You have to walk through the garden to get to the house, so you can’t help but see it,” says Harris, who designed it as an outdoor living space.
Ineichen enjoys breakfast and dinner outdoors beneath one of two catalpa trees, and his home office overlooks the pool, in which he swims regularly.
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On the Inside
Inside, the living room, dining room, and open kitchen make up one large space that gets the full benefit of the view out of the back of the house. Each of the three bedrooms upstairs has its own bathroom and is small but comfortable.
“The house had to be understated. It’s my Swiss roots,” says Ineichen, who was raised in Lucerne and came to the U.S. 20 years ago.
Ineichen explains that he wanted the living areas to seem spacious without being big, and modern but warm. The interior spaces were designed by Lucien Rees Roberts, who runs his own interior- and landscape-design firm in tandem with Harris’s business (the two are married).
David Kelly, a partner in Rees Roberts’s firm, designed the garden. Ineichen was so in tune with Rees Roberts’s vision that the only change he made to the designer’s midcentury-modern-accented contemporary scheme, which included a cool color palette and a vintage Italian chandelier above the dining table, was to request a deeper sofa in the living room.
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A Special Project
Harris’s projects range from the personal (such as his renovation of the A. Conger Goodyear House, a modernist landmark on Long Island, for the real estate developer Aby Rosen) to the public (the overhaul of Barneys stores in New York and Beverly Hills). He explains that helping to design this house, though, was “a relative labor of love.”
“Like me,” Harris says of Ineichen, “he has only one car with four doors.”
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