In the 1930s, new Cadillacs were unveiled to the public during glitzy reveals in the ornate Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York. It must have been quite a sight to see an enormous V16 Cadillac parked on top of a Persian rug while flashbulbs burst incessantly around it. Philanthropist and avid car collector Steve Plunkett of London, Ont., made it his goal to recreate some of that glamour when he set out to design his own personal garage.

Plunkett is one of the world’s most prolific Cadillac collectors — he has 86 cars and most of those are Cadillacs with a few Buicks and Oldsmobiles thrown in for variety. A full list of the cars housed in the collection can be found here on Plunkett’s website. There are several garages on the property, but the crown jewel is the garage where his 1930s and ’40s Cadillacs are kept. Named the “Fleetwood Auto Salon,” the garage houses just more than a dozen of his most prized Cadillacs.

The inside of the Fleetwood Auto Salon was modelled after the same art deco-style Waldorf Astoria ballroom that was host to many of his cars when they were brand new and being unveiled for the first time. How else would you display such beautiful cars? It would be a shame to relegate extraordinary cars to an ordinary garage, so Plunkett gives these cars the space they deserve.

Few of the cars in his pristine collection are shorter than 18 feet long and none have any less than eight cylinders (except for one primitive 1907 Cadillac that sports a single-cylinder engine). Cadillacs of the 1930s were large, powerful and fantastically expensive. Proud hood badges denote whether there are 16, 12 or eight cylinders softly humming under the long, polished hoods. The graceful hood ornaments on these cars stand at roughly chest height for most and they sit atop imposingly tall chrome grills.

One car in the huge collection that Plunkett is particularly fond of is his one-of-one 1934 Cadillac convertible coupe. The mammoth coupe’s 19-foot length made it one of the longest cars in the world at the time. Despite being built during the depth of the Great Depression, the Caddy coupe is powered by a gas-swilling 7.4-litre V16 engine that made the car nearly as fast as a Duesenberg. All those cylinders and cubic inches resulted in 140 horsepower, which was nearly double what a contemporary Ford V8 made.

Another unique one-off in the collection is the stunning 1949 Cadillac Coupe DeVille prototype. It was custom built to wow audiences at GM’s “Transport Unlimited” show in 1949 at the Waldorf Astoria. The stunning coupe was viewed by 300,000 eager showgoers in New York and another 300,000 in Detroit. It is the first car to feature a curved, one-piece windshield and the public’s positive reaction to the car convinced Cadillac to rush the Coupe DeVille into production for late 1949.

Despite the tremendous rarity and value of the cars, Plunkett drives them regularly on the roads surrounding his home. He says that the old Caddys have a “solid feel” on the road and that cars made before 1934 aren’t very comfortable above 90 km/h. He acknowledges that sitting unused is a terrible thing to do to a car and he tries to drive two to three a day when the weather is co-operating. In all, he estimates that he puts about 100 kilometres on each car annually and he doesn’t plan to stop driving them any time soon.