How we got a 964 RS into a shopping mall
There is a version of this story where we simply opened a shop. That version is shorter and considerably less interesting.
The Edition Space is open at Dubai Hills Mall. It is the first room where everything the Maison makes exists in one place — the leathers you can only really judge in your hands, the Alcantara that photographs as a flat colour and does not behave like one, the vaults, the chests, the trays. It is the answer to the question we have been asked most often, which is some version of can I see one first.
And in the middle of it is a car.
A silver 964
A 964 Carrera RS, in silver, in the kind of condition that makes people go quiet for a second before they say anything. It is not there as decoration. It is there because it explains the shop faster than we can — and, if you ask, it is available on request.
Everything about that car is the argument we make about objects. It is the lightest, least comfortable and most deliberate version of a 911 that Porsche built at the time — stripped of the things that were not doing work, and left with the things that were. It has cloth where other cars have leather, and it is better for it. Somebody, thirty years ago, made a series of restraint decisions and every one of them has aged well.
Stand next to it and then look at a Pepita watch case, and you do not need the paragraph we would otherwise have written.
The part that nearly did not happen
Dubai Hills Mall is a mall. The Edition Space is a unit on the first floor. Between those two facts is a logistical problem that occupied several weeks and a number of people who are considerably better at this than we are.
A car cannot be driven into a mall. It cannot go up an escalator, and it does not fit in a service lift. The only route was up — which meant a spider crane, a mall closed to the public, and a window measured in hours rather than days.
A spider crane is an extraordinary machine: it folds down small enough to pass through a standard doorway, then plants four outriggers and lifts several tonnes. Watching one unfold inside a shopping centre at night, next to a car worth more than most of the units around it, is not a relaxing experience.
The lift itself took a fraction of the time the preparation did. Straps under the sills. Weight taken up in millimetres while four people watched four different clearances. A slow rotation, a long pause, and then a car sitting on a mall floor where a car should not be, being pushed the last few metres by hand because nobody was going to start it indoors.
The footage is below. Describing it does not do it justice, and several of the people involved deserve to see themselves in it.
What the room is for
The Edition Space is not really a shop, or not only one. It is where the Material Library stops being a web page and becomes a wall of physical swatches you can put next to each other under real light.
That matters more than it sounds. Almost every customer who arrives with a colour combination in mind leaves with a different one, and it is almost never because we talked them out of it. Screens lie about Alcantara in particular — a lining that reads near-black online turns out to be a deep aubergine, and the piece it was going into changes accordingly.
Personalisation is done here. Bespoke commissions start here. Private appointments happen outside trading hours, and can be arranged for anyone who would rather not do this in a mall on a Thursday evening.
Come and see it
Dubai Hills Mall, first floor, unit FF‑402. Open daily from 10am until midnight. No appointment needed to walk in and handle everything, and one required if you want the room to yourself.
The car is not going anywhere for now. Getting it back out is a problem for another night.
The Edition Space · The Automotive Gallery · Book a private appointment
