And this is the Ferrari's bedroom…

Ask any owner of a classic car what it means to them and they’ll rhapsodise about it being equivalent to a Picasso painting or Rodin sculpture. Ask an owner of a sleek “supercar” like a Lamborghini what it feels like to drive and they might compare it to being in a fighter plane.

Yet even architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller, who were motoring enthusiasts and even created their own models - the Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion is currently part of the new Motion exhibition at the Guggenheim in Bilbao - mostly consigned cars to life in a porch or shed.

It’s something that clearly puzzled the petrolhead par excellence Rowan Atkinson. “I don’t like the toy cupboard syndrome that causes so many good cars to evaporate,” he said. “It depresses me that they are hidden away like investment art, or gold ingots in a Swiss vault.” You can see his point: why spend £240,000 on an Aston Martin Vantage or £1.7 million on a Ferrari Daytona SP3 (and Ferraris go as far up as £50 million) and not show it off? Just as you wouldn’t keep a Monet in a cupboard under the stairs or a first-edition Dickens in the bathroom, why put your £15 million McLaren F1 outdoors?

The entrance of Garage Deluxe’s subterranean bunker (COURTESY OF GARAGE DELUXE)

If Jonathan Clark of Garage Deluxe has his way, you soon won’t. The architect is leading the way in creating buildings for a new generation of wealthy car-lovers who not only want to be able to see their cherished motors but to live indoors with them. “I’ve always loved cars and of course architecture, and the two go well together,” he says. “Classic cars are a form of art, which is why it’s strange that such beautiful things are made to sit in dingy garages rather than a type of gallery.”

Having completed a car showroom in Kent, he’s working on a concept design for a modernist house built around an extensive car collection, and a vast 2,300sq m “underground cathedral” for a 25-strong collection of classics on the French/Swiss border. Given it will cost about £12 million to construct, he is understandably tight-lipped as to the identity of the owner, although he (it is usually a he) is not in danger of being sanctioned any time soon, apparently.

From left: Garage Deluxe’s subterranean bunker has room for at least 25 cars; Millimeter Interior Design’s glass-walled garage (COURTESY OF GARAGE DELUXE AND MILLIMETER INTERIOR DESIGN)

“Most enthusiasts still keep them off-site and can’t enjoy them in the comfort of their own home – at best, they’ll have iceberg basements,” Clark says. “But that sort of space is always a bit sad, so I wanted to create a place where the owners could hang out and spend quality time with their cars in a comfortable and relaxing environment. And display them like real art – if you bought a Picasso, you wouldn’t keep it in a crappy room with no lighting.”

Clark is not the first to create buildings to show off motoring masterpieces. Aston Martin is building a streamlined 66-storey condominium in Miami whose three-floor penthouse comes with one of the only 24 Vulcan supercars ever made and furniture made of carbon fibre. It has also collaborated with the starchitect David Adjaye on a suite of apartments in his new skyscraper in Manhattan, drawing on the aesthetic of its car interiors and, presumably, the overwhelming smell of leather.

Perhaps most interestingly, it has launched a design service that will allow enthusiasts to showcase their vehicles in “galleries and lairs” (which, if the marketing material is anything to go by, often contain water features and giant fishtanks). The first individual home, Sylvan Rock in upstate New York, has just been completed with not only a pool, a wine cellar and a treehouse, but also a glass-enclosed gallery to show off the car collection.

A plan by Clark for a basement extension with a pool (COURTESY OF GARAGE DELUXE)

“As an ultra-luxury brand, we’re focused on things like form, materiality and beauty and, when you’re designing a car, you talk about its ‘architecture’ and work to a human scale. So there’s already a lot of synergy between the disciplines,” says Marek Reichman, the chief creative officer at Aston Martin. “The joy of ownership for a car and a property should be the same – these are long-term purchases – and unique building spaces are hard to come by, so we thought we should help.”

Porsche completed its PD Tower in Miami five years ago, with 132 homes served by a robotic garage that will park your precious sports car quite literally outside your door, whatever floor you’re on, allowing you to check in on it every time you get up to go to the kitchen. It’s not entirely certain what the robot does with anything that’s not a Porsche.

A multifunctional underground car cave by Garage Deluxe (COURTESY OF GARAGE DELUXE)

Meanwhile, Michael Liu, of Millimeter Interior Design in Hong Kong, has created a £1 million house in Sai Kung that puts a car – this time a Ferrari – right in the living room, thanks to a double-space, glass-walled garage. The client, needless to say, is an avid collector of the Italian show-ponies. “There aren’t that many clients willing to do that,” Liu says, “but I hope this will convince others that it can be done. It’s an unusual concept, but for the client, this allows him to appreciate his collection in daily life, and even rotate it.”

And as one of the examples in the new second edition of the book Carchitecture by Thijs Demeulemeester, Thomas De Bruyne and Bert Voet shows, you may not need walls between you and the next generation of electric vehicles. In Arnhem in the Netherlands Studio OxL have created a living room into which you can drive and park your zero-emission Tesla. It certainly creates a striking spectacle – there is something foreign, surreal, almost transgressive in the juxtaposition of the muscular car, unnaturally still and striking, and the domesticity of sofa and rug and pot plant. Heck, it might really be art.

But what’s clear is that the relationship between cars and architecture is here to stay: as Motion, the exhibition at the Guggenheim in Bilbao curated by Britain’s Lord Foster, shows, the history of design and the history of the automobile are perhaps inextricably intertwined. There are few things simultaneously as iconic and functional as a Mini or a Ferrari, and it is perhaps architecture that looks enviously at the sleek lines or raw power of a 1938 Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet or the Firebirds I, II and III that turn heads inside Frank Gehry’s masterpiece of billowing titanium, and not the other way round. As Foster, the man responsible for the $5 billion Apple Park headquarters in California, said at the opening: “The two themes are beauty and technology, and sometimes they morph in perceptively into one vehicle... These [cars] are extraordinarily beautiful objects in their own right and they coexist at an equal level with great works of art and architecture.” So, really, who wouldn’t want one inside their house?