Look at your garage. Shelves of hockey sticks, rusty rakes, mystery cardboard boxes that haven’t been opened since your last move. Now close your eyes and imagine—a guest bedroom, a studio, a clubhouse. For inspiration, take a look inside 10 garages saved from themselves:
Lower Saxony, Germany
Above: A remisenpavillion—a multi-use garage in the farmlands of Lower Saxony—designed by Bremen-based Wirth Architekten for a country house estate, serves utilitarian needs like car and tractor storage, as well as whimsical ones: as a loggia for summertime outdoor parties. Photograph by Christian Burmeister, courtesy of Wirth Architekten.
Above: Melbourne, Australia-based Hearth Studio turned a garage into a small home complete with kitchen, dining area, bedroom, and bath (with green clawfoot tub). The designers managed to fit it all in while retaining the character of the garage, including its hardworking concrete floor. For more, see Outbuilding of the Week: Garage Turned Studio Apartment. Photograph by Lauren Bamford.
Seattle, Washington
Above: Seattle-based JAS Design Build turned an old boathouse on Lake Washington into a multipurpose family center with changing room, shower, and storage for sports equipment.
Above: A one-car garage outside of San Francisco became a guest cottage, or “grottage,” with the addition of French doors, a wall of storage space, and a tiny kitchen and bath. Read the whole story in Outbuilding of the Week: The 186-Square-Foot Guest Cottage. Photograph by Nicole Franzen for Gardenista.
Austin, Texas
Above: A garage turned guest house has a bedroom alcove with a dormer window (above the bed) which mimics and size and shape of a kitchen window in the main house. Photograph courtesy of Tim Cuppett Architects.
Above: Architect Christi Azevedo’s hands-on knowledge of fabrication, construction, and materials is on display in her renovation of a dilapidated, 360-square-foot 1908 carriage house in Oakland, California. Photograph by Susanne Friedrich and Henry DeFauw, courtesy of Christi Azevedo.
Above: Designer Karin Montgomery Spath transformed a garage, for clients to live in while their house in Auckland was being renovated. “I suggested that I could make a loft apartment above the two-car garage for them to live in during the renovation, and that it wouldn’t cost much more than a rental,” says Karin. Photograph by Matthew Williams.
Above: A Portland, Oregon couple converted a garage into three distinct parts: a ceramics studio, a storage room for bikes, and a wood shop. The ceramics studio, shown through the sliding glass doors above, is partitioned from the rest of the space to be free of dust from the wood shop.
Above: A Hollywood couple remodeled their 100-year-old garage to become a miniature house in full, complete with a living space, kitchen, bedroom, bath, and private patio. Read the whole story in Rehab Diary: From Garage to Tiny Cottage in LA, on a Budget. Photograph by Bethany Nauert.
Washington, D.C.
Above: Architect Catherine Fowlkes of Fowlkes Studio converted a unused garage into a guest cabana and to create direct access from the house into a large backyard. Photograph by Brandon Webster courtesy of Fowlkes Studio.
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