At 119 Great North Road (119 GNR as the building has come to be known), the luxury cars sparkle like jewels in the windows of the showroom, and the angles of the concrete structure in the building’s interior are also a head turner.

Designed by Warren and Mahoney in collaboration with Giltrap and the car brands it showcases, the new building is made up of a 1,500m² street-level showroom, with three commercial office floors above and four basement levels, where the workshop, staff-training areas and car parking is located. Project architect Barrington Gohns says the overall aim was to allow the cars to take centre stage.

“The building is stripped down to its most essential form and then the cars are the feature moment. There are no real dressed elements, just the structure. You get this nice contrast between the raw and the refined. It is akin to a gallery condition, with the bright yellow Lamborghini and the metallic blue Bentley on display against this raw backdrop.”

The design of the showroom breaks down some hierarchical barriers that usually exist around luxury car brands. A café in the entranceway, leased by Richmond Road staple Ripe Delicatessen, is open to the public, meaning that anyone looking for a take-out coffee or a muffin can experience the atmosphere of these high-performance machines.

A break-out space on the second floor is also open to the public and used by the (non-Giltrap specific) offices on the upper floors. Each brand delivered a set of requests to Warren and Mahoney, but how these were delivered was specific to the dealer, which knows its local market, explains Gohns.

“Each brand has a customer identity, which comes with a catalogue of must-haves, like a customisation area, hospitality area and a reception space. The brands usually get their own architects to design these, but Giltrap uses local architects to make a more customer-driven design, which is then sent to the brand’s architect to peer review.

Overseas the apparel section is popular and you need changing-room space, whereas here, the coffee point needs to be prominent, as we like the social aspect of a café.”

The brands each have their own ‘jewellery boxes’, or glass cases, to enclose their best and brightest models. Imported low-iron glass is used for these and for the showroom windows, providing extra-clear visibility into the spaces day or night.

“The brand is captured inside these boxes in a similar way to how the Apple logo is encased in glass at its building in New York, with the object glowing from within,” says Gohns.

To illuminate the cars optimally but also provide a sleek backdrop for them to shine in, Warren and Mahoney worked with Targetti to create a fitting called the X1, which houses all the power, data, sprinkler and lighting mechanisms in one linear fitting.

“This is akin to a car where they reticulate all the service runs in the panelling and the conduit runs in the engine,” explains Gohns.

Similarly, most of the furniture in the building, such as the reception desk and lounge chairs, is chosen to merge into the background. The brands had requirements for the furniture in their respective sections, however, which includes Bentley’s lounge chairs, designed to complement the seating in their vehicles, and Aston Martin’s signature travertine tiles.

The space allocated to each brand at the Auckland showroom is over and above the minimum required, with extra space given in the mezzanine floor upstairs. Ramps provide access to each floor, and these were specifically designed with future models of each car in mind, including large format SUVs such as Bentley’s Bentayga.

“Because many of the cars have such low clearance and are all different lengths, we came up with a customised ramp where we essentially created a sine wave curve in profile, which is made up of 25 sections of structure that is screeded to make a smooth surface,” says Gohns.

This ramp system corkscrews through the building, which means there is no real need to take these high-end vehicles onto the busy road, where they could get scratched or even just rained on.

The basement workshop level is overlooked by the floor above, so customers can see the service available without walking onto a workshop floor, with its potential hazards.

Three years in the making and with a $40 million budget, the new Giltrap Group headquarters and the showrooms they house are subtle and refined, giving full respect to the automotive genius of its products and allowing them to be displayed like shining jewels.