Porsche Design Tower: Inside Sunny Isles' Car-Elevator Icon

Every skyline has one building that visitors ask about first. On Sunny Isles Beach, it is the cylindrical tower at 18555 Collins Avenue where residents ride the elevator sitting in their cars. Porsche Design Tower opened in 2017 as the first residential tower branded by Porsche Design, and a decade on it remains the purest expression of a very Miami idea: that a building can be engineered around a single obsession and find one hundred thirty-two buyers who share it. This is a deep-dive on how the building actually works, drawn from our building research, and on who it fits.

What the Dezervator actually does

The tower's signature is the Dezervator, the patented robotic elevator system developed for the project by Dezer Development. You drive into a glass car lift at ground level, and the system carries you — in the driver's seat — up the core of the building and deposits the car in a private "sky garage" adjacent to your own residence. There is no valet handoff and no parking level; the car lives on your floor, visible from your living room if you want it to be. It is easy to file this under gimmick until you consider what it replaces: for collectors, the garage is the point of the house, and this is the only high-rise format ever built that treats it that way. The engineering also explains the building's cylindrical form — the car cores run vertically through the center, and the residences wrap the perimeter.

The residences and the amenity set

Because the cores eat the center of the floorplate, every residence runs to the outside of the cylinder, and every one of them faces the ocean. Units span three to six bedrooms, and the balconies are engineered as outdoor rooms — private plunge pools or spas and summer kitchens on the terrace are standard equipment rather than penthouse exceptions. The tower rises 60 stories with just 132 residences, a very low unit count for its height, which tells you how large the individual homes are. Sieger Suarez designed the architecture, with interiors by Porsche Design Studio, and the amenity program leans into the brand: a racing simulator in the amenity suite, a beachfront restaurant, and the full oceanfront package — pool deck, spa, fitness, beach service — that the Sunny Isles flagship tier expects.

What it costs, and what it costs to run

Per our building research — directory figures, not live comps — residences here have ranged from roughly 4.5 million to 40 million dollars, averaging in the neighborhood of 1,650 dollars per square foot depending on line, floor and finish. Carrying costs deserve equal attention: our research estimates association dues around 2 dollars and 10 cents per square foot per month, which on a 4,000-square-foot residence works out to roughly 8,400 dollars a month before taxes and insurance. That is the price of operating robotic car elevators, beach service and a restaurant for 132 homes, and it is typical of the branded oceanfront tier. Current availability and pricing move constantly; our live market report at /market-stats and the building's own listing page carry the up-to-date picture.

Porsche versus Bentley: Dezer's two acts

The clearest way to understand Porsche Design Tower's staying power is that its developer is building the sequel two blocks down the beach. Bentley Residences, at 18401 Collins Avenue, takes the same Dezervator concept into a taller, larger format — 63 stories and 216 residences behind a diamond-faceted glass facade, designed again by Sieger Suarez and slated for completion around 2028, when it is set to stand as the tallest tower on a U.S. beach. Our research shows it roughly seventy percent sold ahead of delivery, on a deposit schedule of ten percent at contract, ten at groundbreaking, ten at a structural milestone and the balance at closing. For a buyer deciding between them, the trade is delivered-and-proven versus newer-and-later: Porsche is an operating building with a decade of association history you can read; Bentley is launch-tier product with construction timeline risk and 2028 delivery. Both answers are rational; they are answers to different questions.

Who the building fits — and who it doesn't

Porsche Design Tower fits the buyer whose cars are genuinely part of daily life, who wants oceanfront living without surrendering the garage, and who values a building where the engineering is the amenity. It also fits collectors who treat the sky garage as secure, climate-controlled storage with a view. It fits less well if the car theme is indifferent to you — you would be paying for infrastructure you will not use, and the broader Sunny Isles flagship tier, from Acqualina to Jade Signature, offers oceanfront service without it. As with any tower of this vintage, the standard due diligence applies in full: read the association budget, the reserve funding and the milestone-inspection status before you fall for the machine. When you want the closed-comp history for a specific line, that is a building-level conversation we are glad to have.