Not every garage is built to store cars — some are built to celebrate them. For them, Russian architecture studio ATRIUM has completed the ‘Garage for Car Collection’— a 200 square meter structure tucked into a wooded private estate on the outskirts of Moscow that treats its automobiles less like machines and more like museum-worthy objects.
The project is the latest addition to a private estate, ATRIUM, originally designed in the early 2000s, which includes a manor house and guest house. Rather than a standalone commission, this garage continues a deliberate architectural lineage — only this time, the brief called for something far more layered. The building doesn’t just store cars. It functions as a curated vehicle gallery, a home gym, a business meeting space, a lounge, a mud room, and even a ski rack room — all unified under a single, fluid envelope.
Designer:
The form that holds all of this together is drawn from the Möbius strip. A continuous ribbon-like gesture wraps around the site, organizing the program across three levels. At ground level, a glazed exhibition space — framed by expansive facades with ultra-thin profiles on the north and south sides — puts the vehicle collection on full display. The ribbon then ascends diagonally to a rooftop outdoor workout terrace, while descending below grade into a gym and office, where discreet ground-level apertures pull in natural light without disrupting the building’s clean exterior reading.
Materiality is where ATRIUM’s precision really shows. The exterior is clad in seamless white Corian — a surface that evokes aerodynamic engineering — while wood and copper warm up the interior spaces. The contrast is intentional: the building reads as something athletic and mechanical from the outside, intimate and refined from within. It’s a space that mirrors the cars it shelters.
What makes the project genuinely remarkable, though, is what wasn’t touched. Every existing tree on the wooded plot was preserved, with the building’s footprint carefully negotiated around the forest. In a field where development and ecology tend to work against each other, ATRIUM treats the surrounding woodland as a collaborator rather than an obstacle. The underground expansion minimizes the building’s visible impact on the landscape, letting the structure feel as though it surfaced from the forest floor rather than was imposed upon it.
Completed in 2024, the project was designed in 2020 by a team led by Anton Nadtochiy and Vera Butko. It has since been named a finalist at the World Architecture Festival 2025 in two categories: Completed Buildings – Transport, and the Small Project Prize — recognition that confirms what the building itself already suggests: the garage, as a typology, has been quietly, elegantly reimagined.
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