Garages

Our house in Fairfax is (as mentioned in the previous posting and as suggested in the photo below) a good quarter garage in total.  This does not make for the most attractive facade...

...but life without a garage is now already unimaginable to me.  Really.  We live on the bottom floor and the garage on the far right is ours (and, again, as previously blogged, we have also adopted the middle one for a time).  Its impact on our life, and in particular on my sense of well-being, was and continues to be enormous.

My adult life has been only rarely blessed with utilizable garage space, and never before with one I did not have to share with strangers or which was not already full of someone else's belongings.  It is a luxury of an altogether higher order than granite countertops and vacations in Gstaad.  One can cut on almost anything, and one can have a good time in many places the rich and famous do not frequent.  As space to stick stuff goes a garage trumps all of the clever cubbies we built into our Amsterdam apartment.  Our shed at Wilhelminalaan was but John the Baptist to this, the coming of the True Son of Storage.  And the feeling I get when driving a car--an entire car!--into it and closing the door behind...well, I imagine I know how NASA's boys feel upon successfully docking the Space Shuttle.

Talia's parents visited us over the winter holiday and during a walk on Christmas Day, while strolling through our neighborhood and critiquing the local architecture, I mentioned that whatever our next house might or might not offer the one thing I would insist upon was a garage.  In fact I want two, and if I can get that then the rest of the house may be tacked on willy-nilly.  I meant it then, I mean it now:  a good garage can save a house, but no house, I now realize, can be complete by itself.

It appears I am hardly alone in this predilection. We are currently on vacation and have settled for a few days in a cabin at the end of a new residential development up north near Lake Shasta.  This development is dotted with large houses and each house is blessed with, get this, at least five garage spaces.  No joke.  Here's one:

Note not just the massive garage extension, but how, taken together, the garage volume appears to be fully equal to the total residential space provided.  Here's another:

The building on the right is actually a two-car garage.  What is not shown in this photo are the two additional separate garages on the property, one of which is large enough to hold a 1/2 ton truck.

The house above is noteworthy not only for its gargantuan garage extension--both taller and wider than the rest of the building--but also for the huge masonic square and compass incorporated into its design, as though to suggest King Solomon himself should be jealous of so much storage space.  Certainly I am.

One last example:

What strikes me about this is not just the three-car garage that dominates the facade of the main house, nor the separate two-car garage next to it, but the fact that with a total of five interior parking spaces these people still have to park their boat, two four-by-fours, RV (hidden off to the right), and their car outside!  So what on earth is inside?!?

I'd love to see the car go the way of the horse and buggy, but long live the garage!