Earlier I shared an incredible garage I got to photograph in Dubai. Now I’m going to go a bit deeper into my passion for garages.

Although it sure would have been nice if I was born a millionaire, growing up around things like this, I really had no conception of what a nice garage could look like until I laid my eyes on Garage Life magazine while in Japan about a decade ago. If you don’t know what Garage Life magazine is, you’re about to find out. Japan somehow always seems to have a specialty magazine or “Mook” about every random obsession under the sun.

Garage Life magazine is a perfect cross mix between car obsession and home architecture. The magazine features garage centric home designs with the garage often being the key feature of the home. Seeing things like entertainment rooms with clear floors that look over the garage with a Ferrari below you is eternally badass to me. It is not uncommon in Garage Life to see homes essentially built around the garage, with visibility and placement of the cars being key.

As a car lover, the appreciation of vehicle design as an artform seems all too often unjustly relegated to an isolated and enclosed room which is nearly always out of sight and therefore out of mind. The readers and contributors to Garage Life seem to understand this injustice and appreciate the integration and design of the garage as an important part of home design.

The above pictures are the only suitable online example I’ve found of Garage Life’s content. Yet below you’ll find some great pictures from “Design Driven” which is a contest Maserati recently put on for finding the world’s best private owned garages (and promoting Maserati). Since I’m in a position where I don’t feel a need to perpetuate Maserati’s goal of brand promotion, I can say that I think Maserati’s are basically second rate Ferrari rejects (the MC12 being the exception).