In 1977, in Bottrop, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr, Bodo Buschmann and Klaus Brackmann opened a small workshop tuning Mercedes-Benz saloons. The name they chose compressed their surnames. Nearly half a century on, Brabus is still tuning Mercedes-Benzes, supplying louder, faster, darker iterations of the company’s V8 and V12 platforms to private buyers from Munich to Baku, alongside a parallel line of high-performance boats, motorcycles and lifestyle goods.
It is also, now, selling apartments. In May 2026 the company unveiled Brabus Island Baku, an apartment-and-villa development on the Caspian Sea inside Azerbaijan’s Sea Breeze resort city, in cooperation with Reportage Group. It is Brabus’s second branded residence in twelve months, after a sister project announced in Abu Dhabi in April 2025.
For our studio, commissioned to produce the imagery for Brabus Island Baku, that is where the work materially differs from a conventional development brief. We sit at the more cinematic end of the industry, where developer-commissioned films now do much of the heavy lifting in selling buildings that do not yet exist.