About Urban
Urbans Garage Inc. is an independent restoration company specialized in restorations of early Porsche based in Tartu, Estonia, North East Europe.
Urbans Garage expertise gathered over the years and experience of hard work and close to 100 cars restored maximises cars investment potential. Our restorations are performed pursuant to the highest demands of authenticity, where research and development are the key to our target of the finest products available on the market.
The founder Urban Eriksson, a Swedish citizen who has lived in Estonia for the last 20 years, started his restoration career in his parents’ garage in Sweden with Motor Vespas and VWs, and realized that his dream of perfect restorations is a long-term undertaking, needs tremendous amounts of capital and countless attempts and failures.
In 2001, Urban moved to Estonia in order to relocate the industrial production here from Sweden. Here, his ideas of the perfect restoration were somewhat easier to achieve since Estonia was a low-cost country with many good skilled workers with good knowledge of old-school sheet metal work and paint work. People were listening and working together to fulfil Urban’s somewhat crazy ideas. This was the perfect foundation for achieving something bigger. Urban’s hobby turned into a career in 2006 when he stopped working for the Swedish industry and went on full-time with different car projects. First, he worked with different types of cars, but specializing in restoring early Porsches has always been the main target with Porsche 356, Porsche 911 and other race models being his strongest passion.
Urbans Garage charges customers by the hour. Not a single specialist in the world can say exactly how much time the work takes, unless it is a very simple and small work, for example, changing of 356C battery box. Both restorer and customer must understand that in order to achieve something, we must set targets. Our aim is to look at a car first, and yes, we will fly all over the world if needed, and prepare a budget based on the available information. We handle problems in a world class craftsmanship way and do not take short cuts, that’s the only way to benefit from restoration in the long run.
As per 2024 we have been involved with close to 100 car restorations, mostly Porsches and Mercedes. We have restored cars with high historical values and our cars have won many first prices and awards
We do keep as much of original parts as possible
Preservation is a great way of keeping history. Body work is done with the motto that restorations of body shells will be done with a factory appearance and functionality, and if spot welds are used by factory, we will use them too. Sometimes we also restore factory faults; actually, they are not as much faults as original errors. We try to save the original sheet metal as long as we can, this may sound strange if you can buy a cheap reproduction and just replace the part, but in the long run the current market offers no easily fitted reproduction parts and, sometimes, the time spent on fitting the reproduction parts exceeds restoring the original ones. All car have different needs for their body shells, but we must not forget that it is the most vital part of the car on which the most money will be spent during restoration, so do it right and correct, and the car will keep its value and you don’t have to start all over again in couple of years.
In restoring a car’s outside appearance, the paint is not an easy work as well. Porsche 356 and 911 have complicated lines going from the front to the back, and several surfaces based on the sheet metal work must line up perfectly, parts must be assembled, with all the weather-strips in place, parts must be chosen, restored and adjusted to that specific car. We cannot paint a car without securing and testing all the elements which later will be fitted to the painted body shell. This takes time but eliminates the errors which, sooner or later, show up anyway.
We use modern paint materials which also enables us to achieve our high demands. We have put cars on the roads with many years of use, and they still look perfect.
