Some people collect watches, some collect priceless cars. Dutch billionaire Michel Perridon collects an entire car company’s family tree, and then throws in the furniture and sculpture for good measure. A recent tour by Edition One Off in Rotterdam offered the most complete look yet at what is widely regarded as the world’s largest privately owned Bugatti collection, more than 30 cars deep, alongside Carlo Bugatti’s Art Nouveau furniture and Rembrandt Bugatti’s bronze sculptures. The idea was never to just own fast cars, it was to own the whole story.
That story began quietly enough. Perridon bought a Veyron back in 2010, and by his own admission it triggered something. Digging into Ettore Bugatti’s history led him to the rest of the family, Jean who shaped the bodies, Carlo who made furniture, Rembrandt who sculpted animals, and suddenly a car collection became a family portrait. The newest chapter is the one-off Brouillard, reportedly commissioned for somewhere around $25 million, the first result of Bugatti’s new Programme Solitaire.
Sjoerd Schepman, the collection’s curator, worked with Perridon to shape the concept before Bugatti’s designers took over, drawing on a sculpture of Ettore astride his favourite horse. The car’s green paint nods to the vineyards of Alsace, its cabin gets a glass roof Bugatti calls cathedral-like, and there’s a tiny horse tucked inside the gear selector, instead of the dancing elephant. Worth noting though, the finished road car isn’t in Perridon’s garage just yet. What’s been shown so far is a show car running on an electric motor, with delivery pegged for late 2026.
Perridon also owns a Tourbillon, though this too appears to be an early allocation rather than a delivered customer car, given Bugatti only just opened its production facility for the model. Then there are the Veyrons, which are refreshingly not babied. The original has covered over 28,000 miles, while the Grand Sport and the 1,200 horsepower Grand Sport Vitesse have each racked up close to 25,000 miles.
Scattered through the rest of the collection are genuine oddities. Some of the headline cars include a twin crankshaft, sixteen cylinder Type 45 that never reached production, a Type 55 roadster that once won the Rallye des Alpes and sold for over $4 million, and a Type 57 previously owned by Nicolas Cage. A couple of the older cars, including a Type 57G Tank and an Aérolithe, are faithful recreations rather than surviving originals, which does nothing to dull their charm.
Reports peg the value of Perridon’s Bugatti collection at around 90 million dollars, though that figure doesn’t come from an independent appraisal. Either way, it remains a rolling, occasionally recreated, thoroughly-lived-in history of Bugatti itself.
