Mercedes-Benz‘s luxury performance brand, AMG, has opened a dedicated showroom for the first time.

The AMG brand, sold for over 45 years by Mercedes-Benz dealerships, opened its first ever outpost in Beijing, China, this week, describing the move as ‘breaking new ground’.

Covering 381 square meters across two levels, the avant-garde styled store is part museum, part sales floor, with areas dedicated to AMG’s motorsports history and its current products and a place for consumers to explore the customization options available.

It’s likely, thanks to the showroom’s location in Sanlitun, that the AMG Performance Centre could become a tourist attraction, with the designers adding striking black granite floors, white, high-gloss glass walls and plenty of exhibits for car-mad visitors to explore.

Once just a sub-brand for Mercedes-Benz, AMG has increasingly been carving a niche for itself in the high-performance market, growing in independence to become a force to rival the likes of Porsche in a way that BMW’s equivalent M range and Audi’s Quattro haven’t yet managed to do.

The €177,000 SLS AMG, which launched in 2010, was the first car ever designed in-house by AMG and marked a significant departure for the name, which was previously focused on tuning and upgrading existing Mercedes-Benz models.

With the opening of its first store, AMG looks set to step even further out of its creator’s shadow, with the brand confirming that it would be bringing other showrooms to global cities soon.