The Newport Car Museum, opening in June, will be ‘more of an art museum than a car museum’

Gunther and Maggie Buerman turned a private collection into New England’s largest auto museum, housed in a 114,000-square-foot former missile plant in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Since opening in June 2017, the Newport Car Museum has grouped more than 75 cars into six themed galleries spanning Corvettes, Shelbys, fin-era cruisers, and American muscle. What started as one couple deciding not to keep their cars locked away became a destination built to feel like an art gallery as much as a garage.

Most private car collections stay private. Gunther Buerman’s almost didn’t – not because he ran out of room, but because his wife Maggie asked him a question he couldn’t shake: sell the cars, or share them? The answer took shape in a 114,000-square-foot former missile plant on 17 acres in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, a building that once had nothing to do with cars at all. By the time the doors opened on June 1, 2017, what had been a personal obsession had become New England’s largest auto museum. Walk through the entrance today and the first thing that hits you isn’t the horsepower on display – it’s the realization that someone built a cathedral for cars most owners would keep locked in a garage.

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From Missile Plant to Motoring Museum

The transformation is hard to picture until you see it: a Cold War-era industrial building repurposed into a 70,000-square-foot exhibit hall, arranged across six themed galleries covering everything from Ford and Shelby to Corvette, World Cars, Fin Cars, American Muscle, and a dedicated Mopar wing. Buerman is chairman of American Rock Salt and a former chairman of Harris Beach LLC, a New York law firm – not exactly the resume of a typical museum founder, which is part of what makes the place feel less corporate and more personal.

A Corvette Timeline and a Shelby Shrine

One gallery traces the Corvette’s evolution from a 1954 convertible all the way to a 2016 Z06 C7.R coupe, laid out so visitors can watch the design language change decade by decade. Another section is given over entirely to Carroll Shelby, complete with a banked display track showing off a 1965 GT350R alongside a companion Cobra 427 SC. The collection has grown since opening – from roughly 50 cars in its earliest days to more than 75 today.

For muscle car fans specifically, the American Muscle gallery is worth the trip on its own, but the real draw is how the whole building is arranged more like a curated art exhibit than a warehouse of chrome and horsepower. That was Maggie Buerman’s instinct from the start, and it shows in every gallery.

Portsmouth Joins a Growing List of Private Museums Gone Public

The Newport Car Museum is part of a broader trend among serious private collectors, converting personal garages that once held only a handful of visitors into full public institutions complete with professional curation, rotating exhibits, and educational programming. That shift reflects a recognition among wealthy collectors that a car sitting behind a locked door benefits almost nobody, while the same car on public display can educate visitors, support automotive history and preservation, and still remain the owner’s property. Buerman’s decision to open his collection rather than simply expand his private garage put Rhode Island on the map for automotive tourism in a way the state had not previously had.

Why a Missile Plant Made an Unlikely Museum Home

Choosing a former Cold War-era missile manufacturing facility as a museum site was not an obvious decision, but the building’s sheer scale made it practical in a way a purpose-built structure would have struggled to match on the same budget. Industrial buildings from that era were engineered with wide-open floor plans, high ceilings, and heavy-duty flooring meant to support manufacturing equipment, characteristics that translate surprisingly well into museum exhibit space capable of handling rows of parked cars without the structural modifications a converted retail or office building would need.

American Muscle Sits Alongside a Deep Corvette and Shelby Focus

While the American Muscle gallery gives Camaros, Mustangs, and their contemporaries their own dedicated space, the museum’s Corvette and Shelby sections represent an especially deep specialization within the broader collection, tracing design evolution across decades rather than displaying isolated highlights. That kind of chronological, story-driven curation is closer to what visitors expect from a design museum than a typical car show, reinforcing Maggie Buerman’s original instinct that the collection deserved to be presented as art rather than simply parked in rows.

A Collection That Keeps Growing Since Opening

The jump from roughly 50 cars at the Newport Car Museum’s June 2017 opening to more than 75 today shows a collection that has continued expanding well past its original launch, rather than settling into a fixed permanent display. That continued growth suggests Buerman has kept actively acquiring since going public with his cars, treating the museum less as a finished monument to a finished collection and more as an ongoing project that visitors touring the six themed galleries can expect to see change on repeat visits.

A Rhode Island Destination Built for Repeat Visits

Positioning the museum around themed galleries rather than a single sprawling room gives return visitors a reason to come back, since each section, from the World Cars wing to the dedicated Mopar gallery, can be updated or rearranged independently as the collection grows. That gallery structure, more common in fine-art museums than car collections, is exactly the detail that separates the Newport Car Museum from a typical roadside collector-car attraction.

A Model for How Other Collectors Might Follow

The Newport Car Museum’s success in converting a private hobby into a functioning public institution has become something of a reference point for other serious collectors weighing whether to open their own garages to visitors. Few private collections reach the scale Buerman assembled, but the underlying model — repurposing large industrial space, organizing by theme rather than chronology alone, and treating the collection as a living, growing exhibit rather than a fixed monument — offers a practical blueprint that does not require a founder’s fortune to be worth studying.

Visitors touring all six galleries in a single trip should expect to spend several hours working through the collection, a pace closer to a fine-arts museum walkthrough than a quick stop at a roadside attraction. That deliberate pacing is intentional, part of the same art-museum philosophy that shaped how Maggie Buerman wanted the space to feel from the very beginning.

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