6 Extraordinary Collections Show True Passion

Architect Peter Kunz built these concrete garage showrooms for a client in Switzerland. Clearly crazy about his cars, the client wanted a spacious place to store, fix and admire his collection. The result is five concrete cubes that are half-buried into the Herdern mountains; the fifth cube is the entrance, with a sliding gate inside.

Here's a peek inside of the luxurious car garage. The voids between the walls are the "shop windows" for each car.

Decorating the windows' glass faces are inscriptions (top right of glass) by the artist Oliver Kühn on the relationship between the automobile and man.

Fluorescent lighting tubes set each section aglow. Murdock used acrylic shelving units to give the bottles a floating appearance and glass doors to keep out dust and fingerprints.

As we can see from this contemporary boys' bedroom, a passion for collecting items usually starts at an early age.

Principal architect Neil Schwartz custom built this shelving unit for the aquatic pieces of his client, a curator for the Steinhart Aquarium at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences.

Schwartz turned what used to be a room filled with breakable curios and jars into the heart of the house. He built the glass wall and shelving unit to display his client's collection in style.

"Now my client's kids could go into the room without breaking anything. And the office allows my client to see what's going on in the adjacent media room so that the family always feels connected to each other somehow," says Schwartz.

A serious collector of Coca-Cola memorabilia turned his Minneapolis, Minnesota, cabin's garage into a 50's-style diner devoted to all things — and we mean all things — Coca-Cola.

Some people have wine cellars, and some people have watch rooms. Interior designer Alexandra Zimmer's client, a watch collector, wanted a room devoted to his watch collection. Each piece is stored facing outward and protected behind a glass door. Packaging and spare parts are all stored in the room as well to increase the watches' resale value.