Garage
A Celebration of the Most Versatile Room Not In The House

Introduction:

The idea that you can do something other than park your car in the garage was already prevalent when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s in suburban Houston. When I was a kid, I played in my neighbor's garage, and I went to church in a different garage. Nondescript on the outside, the latter garage was attached to a rambler out near the airport and was a temporary solution to a building project that was going to bring a Russian Orthodox church to the area. There was something downright surreal about driving up, hitting a garage-door opener, and seeing the door rise on a world of incense, icons, and older Russian ladies (mostly astrophysicists in the Old Country). The garage, while not the epicenter of my childhood social life, certainly captured the overflow.

Maybe it's that childhood vision of the garage door opening onto another, more extraordinary world that gives me such a sense of the possibilities that lurk behind garage doors. Without a doubt, the weirdest garage I ever saw had dust from every country in the Western world and eggs in it shaped like question marks. Such a collection was amassed by a Midwestern milkman, whose creative passion found its rightful place in his backyard alley. The most beautiful garage? Mindful that garage beauty is a subjective thing, I'd suggest that there's a garage in Wisconsin that shimmers like a castle on the hill. The most poetic garage: a solitary space with a screen door and a simple cot for naps. The messiest garage was in Texas and its owner a collector of used automobile parts and geodes, mattresses, and pocketknives, all of which found their home in a series of garagelike sheds.

While the attic holds memories of the past, the garage lives in the present tense. If the house is the ego, the garage is the id of the domestic setting. It's a container -- for cars, certainly, but also for the dreams and passions of the house's occupant.

My own garage was built for a Model T, and then someone later added a little extension out the front. Right now, my garage is nothing more than a container with potential: In a snowstorm it holds the Volvo, and the rest of the time it houses the things we like to use when it's warm, like bicycles and gardening equipment.

From the moment we moved into this house, we've considered the garage as a place of great potential. At any point in time, it can serve to answer -- at least, conceptually -- the latest problem our 1918 Prairie School home presents. At one time we considered turning the garage into a guest cottage. Lately, as we contemplate the birth of a child and the loss of a bedroom that's been functioning as an office, we imagine the garage anew as a combination office for my husband and me, as an art studio for my husband, or as a teenager's hangout.

That's one of the things I hope this book does for you: help you imagine the garage as a place that can capture the changes with which life presents us. One's garage is a highly personal space, not usually intended for public viewing. So it has been an honor to be invited into so many garages. I hope they prove as interesting and inspirational to you, as you consider the potential of the place where you park your car.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: In the Garage

Chapter 2: Shops & Studios

Chapter 3: Garage Ventures

Chapter 4: Garage Leisure

Chapter 5: Living in the Garage

Chapter 6: Parking in the Garage

Soft-cover, 9-1/2 x 10 in., 216 pages, with color photos and drawings
Published 2003

ISBN: 978-1-56158-645-5