Today, your garage can be anything you want it to be

If you are a homeowner in the United States, there’s a roughly two-thirds chance that you have a garage or carport. And if you have that garage, there’s a good chance you aren’t using it for your car.

As of 2023 data according to U.S. census data, around 66% of new single-family residences had a garage, and most of those were two-car garages. Three-car garages were the runner-up option. But here’s the plot twist: around one-third of America’s garage-endowed homeowners don’t use garages for car storage.

Like many homeowners in the U.S., Kate Balsis had a garage attached to her home in Dana Point, California, but she kept her car parked outside. “We have a driveway and street parking,” she explained. They didn’t need a 420-square-foot space for car storage.

The garage itself was unremarkable and was largely used for laundry. But as Balsis and her husband Chad began renovating their 1970s home throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it was where her two young sons would hang out. It was, after all, where their PlayStation was.

Unexpectedly, the garage became a focal point of their home, Balsis said. “It was just a thoroughfare in the house, I found [my kids] coming in and out of the garage more than the front door.”

For the Balsises, who founded the architectural finishings company Concrete Collaborative in San Marcos, California, the garage was also an opportunity.

“It was actually by living in the house and using the house that we felt like this is like a bonus room that we’re really using, but could be using much more aesthetically,” Kate said. “We could make it someplace beautiful.”

Largely with their own two hands, they ended up transforming the garage into a multifunctional space packed with Ikea cupboards and storage. Warmed by plywood walls, the area hosts remote workstations for Kate and Chad and still has a hangout space for their kids — the PlayStation remains a permanent fixture.

The garage also serves as an aesthetic experiment for Kate and Chad. “We did it almost not questioning ourselves because, oh, it’s just a garage,” Kate Balsis said. “So we had more fun with it in a sense.”

The interior is awash with Concrete Collaborative’s colorful tile and terrazzo, which checkerboards the floor and defines the desk space. Even the central coffee table features a terrazzo fragment from their shop. To decorate, the couple sourced furniture from Facebook marketplace, and made mass-produced cabinetry unique by swapping out the door handles for Etsy finds. Each corner is carefully thought out, but the space remains functional.

“It can be designed but still feels like you can come in on a skateboard or a bike,” she said. “It’s not a precious space by any stretch of the imagination.”

As regions in more and more U.S. states loosen zoning restrictions around accessory dwelling units to address pernicious housing shortages, some homeowners are reworking their garages from the ground up.

Many garage transformations come when clients are already renovating their homes, explained architect Ian Butcher, something that some clients felt moved to do as an aftershock of the COVID-19 pandemic. “During the pandemic, people were stuck at their house and looking carefully to see what they could do to make their space better,” said Butcher, founding partner at the Pacific Northwest architecture firm Best Practice.

A number of clients have asked Best Practice to transform their attached and unattached garages into spaces to house family members and parents in later stages of life. Two such projects — Dad Pad and Granny Pad — saw garages transformed into ADUs for clients’ parents.

“It’s very typical,” Butcher said of this renovation, where a client wants to “accommodate autonomy” but still “live close to” an aging parent.

Transforming garages can pose some design challenges, Butcher noted. “A lot of those have to do with the existing structure not being suitable for conversion,” he said. For a garage that’s just a rickety structure over a concrete slab with no footing, it’s possible that “you have to effectively tear it down and rebuild it.” Other challenges run the gamut of insulation needs, zoning requirements and fire-safety needs.

Best Practice dubbed one such tear-down project Bread and Butter for its colorful exterior scheme. The existing garage became a smaller structure “that could work with their yard and … be way more efficient for storage,” Butcher said. “It was also set up so that it could be expanded to be a mother-in-law unit.”

Other ADU projects can allow adventurous clients to spread their aesthetic wings, similar to what Kate and Chad Balsis did inside their garage.

“I really try to think about the ADU as this sculpture in the backyard,” said Ben Warwas, founder of the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Byben.

That framing helps Warwas nestle projects into a compact backyard space, creating “three distinct moments” of the yard, the house, and the ADU that “redesign and reactivate the backyard,” he said. “It’s almost as if the yard has gotten bigger, but in reality, it’s gotten smaller.”

Detached or otherwise, the garage looms large in the minds of U.S. homeowners. For tech fanatics, the spaces can be shrines of industry and innovation, with today’s tech giants leaning into the garage-as-birthplace mythology. Google says it was founded in a garage, which you can visit; Apple claims garage origins, which is listed as an attraction in San Jose, California; and Amazon also says it was founded in a garage, which the e-commerce giant recreated for a recent conference. Global tech company HP still owns the garage where it got its start, turning the barn-like structure that it calls the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley” into a museum.

While most U.S. garages aren’t the site of burgeoning tech empires, they’re still entrepreneurial hubs. Sydney Chastain, for example, runs Joy Artisan Bakery out of a garage she transformed in Coppell, Texas.

“I started a business accidentally,” Chastain recalled. She started baking specialty sourdough loaves for her family in 2023, and then for friends and family, and then, as word spread, for paying customers. “I realized I needed a bigger oven,” she said.

But Chastain, 29, needed a bit more than an oven; she also needed some space. Her husband ultimately suggested: what if we transformed the garage, which housed a gym space and random storage, into the bakery?

Over a few months, the couple power-washed and cleaned the garage, painting the walls a soothing green. For a durable finish on the ground, they bought flooring from discount retailer Ollie’s, installing it with friends. Chastain, who estimates that the DIY project cost around $5,000, assembled the rest of her cottage bakery slowly, getting storage racks and a large-format mixer that helps her bake hundreds of loaves each week, meeting demand from her local farmer’s market and porch pick-up days. It's also a space for her to film content for Instagram and TikTok, both integral market tools for a small business.

“It’s nice to have that separation and be able to just focus, but also still be able to be home with my kids,” Chastain explained. “I can kind of clock in and clock out.”