Aston Martin’s Q, the brand’s luxury flagship, is a handcrafted high-tech showroom designed by Aston Martin in partnership with AZA Design’s Alexander Zilberman. The space was designed to be an unparalleled ultra-luxury showplace of British craftsmanship and engineering in midtown Manhattan.
The space, designed with branding, presence and positioning as its overarching goals, serves two main functions: showcasing the cars to the public and curating a strong brand experience for clients as they build and specify their own cars.
The showroom’s mantra is “the car is the star,” and so AZA strived to connect the car display areas to the street and make them feel like part of each other. This is achieved through the use of floor-to-ceiling uninterrupted glass that replaced original building components, fitted within each storefront bay of the building. The modification needed to be done in a way that feels like it belongs to the building, so AZA used similar materials and respected the lines of the existing façade.
Additionally, champagne chamfered metal panels and custom mosaic tiles within each bay define the Aston Martin showroom from the street perspective. The sign band and the interior ceiling lighting fixtures focus the eye down onto the showroom floor where the cars are displayed, using focused lighting to make them appear like sculptures in a gallery with lights reflecting off them like stars and city lights at night.
The inner core of the shop is made up of the drawing room and the virtual stage, which will be used for private spec sessions and are both meant to feel intimate, warm and fully immersive for the client. The showroom interior was designed with choice materials, precision joinery and artisan applications with a very high degree of technical difficulty, to make all interworking mechanical details virtually disappear from sight so that all focus is on the cars or the spec and brand experience functions.
The effect is achieved with walnut floors, millwork and ceiling with residential layered features like a fireplace, lounge seating arrangement, a dining room spec table and a library sample wall with a gigantic state-of-the-art video display as the backdrop and focus of the space.
