The Motor Hall

The client sells rare cars by appointment and wanted a showroom that feels like a members' room, on a street where the neighbours are a century older than the stock. The existing structure came down to its boundary walls and went back up as a double-volume hall: arched steel windows keeping the rhythm of the street, a mezzanine lounge above the floor, and a vehicle lift raising each car from the basement store into the light of the showroom.

To the street, the building gives one deliberate glimpse: a full-height glazed vestibule cut between the brick bays, holding the spiral concrete stair. Passers-by see the stair turning behind the steel glazing bars; what it leads to stays for appointment holders. It is the shop window of a showroom that otherwise keeps its doors shut.

Approvals on a street like this move at the pace of the authority, not the programme — the design and its phasing allowed for that from the first drawing.

A basement of fuelled vehicles beneath an assembly space is first an engineering and fire problem. The structural engineer was appointed and carried by the practice; the fire strategy was resolved as a rational design under SANS 10400-T with a fire engineer — suppression in the basement store, smoke control at the lift shaft, protected escape from the mezzanine — and settled before the fit-out was drawn.