Aston Martin enters the real estate game

Tuesday, 6 August 2019

It is quite common for luxury car manufacturers to get into lifestyle products as well. After all, if you can sell a half a million dollar car, you can easily flog off a $100 hat, a $1,000 pen or a $2,000 hand bag to eager punters with more money that either good sense or good taste.

But Aston Martin has now taken it to a whole new awful level - literally - with a high-rise building full of luxury apartments and HUGE amounts of pretentiousness, if the video above is anything to go by.

The (even pretentiously-named) Aston Martin Residences has started its rise into the downtown Miami skyline after completing the vital foundation works. Created by G and G Business Developments, the company says the 66-storey tower will become the tallest residential building south of New York City when it is completed in 2022. And, yeah, mentioning New York as a comparison when your building is not actually in New York is pretty pretentious…

It might eventually be the tallest thing on Miami's skyline, but the Aston Martin Residence sure ain't the prettiest.

The new development first broke ground in late 2017 and since then the work of creating the foundations for the 250-metre high condominium tower has taken place. On June 30th 2019, a huge concrete pour was completed, distributing the 11,000 cubic metres of concrete that would create the necessary base to sustain the building.

**READ MORE:

Aston Martin handled this bit. Not a thunderous V12 or 007 reference in sight.

* Aston Martin takes aim at Ferrari

* Aston Martin reveals a flying car and a V8 city car, because, why not?

Would sir care to have his DB11 Volante badly photoshopped into a rendering of the Residence?

* World's first rotating skyscraper coming**

'It is always exciting when a project reaches this stage,' said German Coto, CEO of G and G Business Developments. 'Very soon we will complete the ground floor and we expect the first floor to be in place by the end of August. By Christmas we expect to have 8 floors completed and from there the only way is up until we reach the 66th floor!'

Aston Martin's design team has been designing the 'amenity spaces' (a pretentious word for outdoor communal spaces) throughout the building, led by Chief Creative Officer, Marek Reichman.

'One of the greatest joys of design is seeing your work come to life,' he said. 'As this is Aston Martin's first foray into real estate we are especially keen to see the tower start to take shape.'

Reichman presumably said this before actually seeing renderings of the actual building. Which is awful.

The apartments in the Aston Martin Residence range in size from 65 to 1,765 square metres and are priced from US$750,000 (NZ$1.1 million) to upwards of US$50 million (NZ$76 million).

And, yes, more than half have been sold already.

Presumably a parking space comes included in those prices. Hopefully already containing an actual Aston Martin, but we doubt that last bit.

But, let's face it, if you can afford $76 million for an apartment in a tasteless building, Aston Martins are probably a bit below your budget anyway…