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Photography by Brian Tietz

Best of the Gulfshore: Best Luxury Pursuit

duPont Registry is Naples Hub for Serious Car Collectors

One of the brand’s first physical showrooms, the East Naples space connects Southwest Florida buyers to a global network of rare and collectible cars.

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For anyone who grew up grabbing duPont Registry off the magazine rack and lusting over its fender-laden pages, walking into the duPont Registry Naples Experience Center on Linwood Avenue feels like a fantasy made real. Guests are greeted, without apology, by a Ferrari F40, an F50, an Enzo and a 288 GTO—four of the most coveted automobiles ever built, parked side by side like a teenager’s fever dream. They’re not for sale. They’re just there to set the tone, against a contemporary palette, balancing the exposed physicality of a shop floor with polished concrete floors, tall white walls and glass-clad spaces arranged for conversation. “It feels more like an intimate area to showcase a personal collection than a showroom,” Gulfshore Life creative director and auto aficionado Scott Glick says. 

With a focus on rare, million-dollar machines, the location was initially set to open as a West Coast Exotic Cars, the Southern California dealership that Eric Curran, a professional race car driver of 30-plus years, built into a premier collector destination. When he came to Naples, he partnered with fellow gearheads already embedded in the local car world, including amateur racer and collector John Reisman and his colleague Kerry Refkin, and Mike Crofton, who’s managed Reisman’s car collection for years. As they prepared to open, duPont Registry acquired West Coast, folding the Naples and California locations into its growing national network.  “About three years ago, a group of enthusiast investors bought everything within the duPont Registry umbrella with the idea to expand on it,” says Eric, who is now the brand’s president of sales.

After four decades connecting buyers and sellers through magazines and a digital marketplace, the brand is going physical, with a growing national network of showrooms taking shape in California and Nashville, and a new 50,000-square-foot Miami location currently under construction. That Naples was among the first places where the brand chose to plant its flag won’t surprise the legions of local automotive fans in a city anchored by the Revs Institute, the scale of Cars on 5th and the steady presence of Lamborghinis, Ferraris and air-cooled Porsches. “It solidifies Southwest Florida as a certifiable location for world-class car collectors,” Scott says.

At 7,200 square feet and with 15 to 25 cars on-site at any given time, the showroom is intentionally boutique in size, prioritizing trust and attention over volume. Browsing screens on the showroom floor grant access to the full duPont Registry inventory, meaning any car at any duPont dealership could be local in a matter of days. And for sellers, duPont Live—the brand’s online auction platform—provides something virtually unheard of in the industry: a guaranteed reserve check handed to the consignor before the car ever hits the auction block.

Ownership also unlocks access to Cars on 5th and the Palm Beach Cavallino Classic, both now under the duPont umbrella, along with the brand’s Garage app to track the value of your collection. This is a world built for the kind of person who doesn’t just buy cars but collects, races and shows them. And in Naples, that’s not a niche. That’s just the neighborhood.