Art, wine and Ferraris: Inside the luxury garage condos for South Florida’s richest collectors

WEST PALM BEACH — Inside a new Florida facility are any number of luxury collectibles: art, wine, pinball machines, musical instruments and Ferraris, among other sports cars.

They’re part of The Hangar, a private garage condominium catering to South Florida’s richest collectors.

The site is unassuming, with an exception for the very real but inactive Bell 206 helicopter that decorates the rooftop of a lounge. The 68 private storage units — which range from about 1,600 to 4,500 square feet — look like standard, albeit tall, garages.

“I call it a new class of real estate asset,” Scott Cunningham, The Hangar’s founder and CEO, said during a tour he provided to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

“It’s not a typical warehouse because you can’t run a business out of here. It’s not typical storage because you’re not putting your Christmas ornaments in here,” he said.

The Hangar, near West Palm Beach and just footsteps north of the Palm Beach International Airport, is catering to demand for storage space for high-end, luxury belongings — so much so that it has been growing. A Hangar facility already operates in Riviera Beach and another is breaking ground soon in the Hamptons in New York. Cunningham hopes to further address demand with a Hangar facility in Miami, too.

In county documents, land-use attorneys wrote that the nearly 12-acre site along Congress Avenue where The Hangar was built “is in need of development to provide a catalyst for redevelopment and revitalization of this stretch of the Congress Avenue corridor.”

The development “will make a positive contribution to the character of the locality while also providing a valuable resource to collectors within the county.”

Chip Armstrong, a Realtor with the Keyes Company in Palm Beach Gardens, said The Hangar makes sense being built where it is.

“They’re close to the airport. I can get out of my jet. I can Uber over to my Ferrari, right? I can have a car service pick me and my buddies up. And we can ride over to my cars and figure out what we’re going to drive,” he said, giving an example of how someone might benefit from their Hangar unit.

Cunningham said he hopes that The Hangar, which officially opened last fall, will inspire other “really nice” developments in the area.

Indeed, more businesses have been opening around the airport, which lately has drawn headlines over plans to rename it to “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

Less than a mile east of The Hangar is a PopStroke mini-golf center that opened little more than a year ago. At the time, county and airport officials embraced it as yet one more way to draw more visitors to the region, and billed it as “the perfect place for our passengers to hang out before and after a flight.”

Also near the airport, The Hangar offers its occupants many amenities.

A unit owner could, theoretically, store Christmas ornaments if they wanted, Cunningham said — but that wouldn’t make a lot of sense given the price to own one of the garages.

The price is based on square footage, which has been anywhere between about $700 and $800 per square foot.

The latest sale was $1.1 million for 1,300 square feet, with the largest sale being multiple units for $7 million, Cunningham said.

Cunningham’s garage, which serves as the “model home,” feels more like an upscale apartment than a storage spot.

The bottom floor holds two Ferraris, three Porsches, a race car, vintage motorcycles and guitars, along with a full bathroom and a dining area. On the loft above, Cunningham’s garage has a 150-inch flatscreen TV and surround-sound system that he said his grandkids have used for movie nights.

“Nobody complains about the noise because there’s nobody around. Nobody’s living here,” he said.

To demonstrate the viewing experience, Cunningham played the first few minutes of the movie “F1,” a racing movie starring Brad Pitt.

Hangar customers are billionaires, famous athletes and those “who made their fortune for themselves,” Cunningham said.

“Everybody is ultra-high net worth,” he said.