In Houston, when football season kicks off, so does garage season.
In this car-bound city, and beyond, vehicles are being pushed aside to give the garage a second act.
Take Melissa Spence: On many evenings, she can be found relaxing with friends in her garage, feet up on a cooler, Michelob Ultra in hand. She and her husband, Joseph Spence, park on the street, and, where a car would be in the garage, there are instead a half dozen yard chairs, a rug, a big-screen TV, and string lights crisscrossing the ceiling. A mesh screen hangs where the retracted garage door would close, and when you push it to the side, as you might a hippie’s beaded curtain, it’s like entering a magical, mysterious realm.
“It’s become that third space you can go,” Ms. Spence, 49, said, referring to the sociological concept that the home is a person’s first space, work is their second and their third is an informal gathering spot. “People drop by to say hi or pick up the guitar and play,” she said. “It’s a really friendly room now.”
The American garage’s reincarnation looks different depending on the resident: It might be a hideaway man cave, a she-shed, a home theater, a workshop, a crafting zone or a band practice room.
Why hang out here, instead of a house’s air-conditioned living room? For many, the garage opens up an opportunity for interactions with neighbors and passers-by that closing yourself inside a home does not. In a city like Houston, where car-focused living minimizes the chance of running into people, the revived garage is a tool to create the human interaction that some people crave.
In Houston’s Rice Military neighborhood, Jane Haas, 53, spent many of this summer’s evenings sitting in her garage in a folding chair next to her dog and a fan, with Motown playing on the radio. “We’re getting older and I guess we’re becoming porch people,” she said one night, as a neighbor walked by and said hello. “But since we don’t have a porch, this is the place where friends will drop by for a drink or to maybe watch sports with us when we bring our TV down. Our garage has become our front porch.”
Once upon a time, the 20th-century American dream included a white picket fence and a home with a two-car garage. But that dream has changed for many.
For a number of people, the garage is a catchall space to store not just cars but bikes, strollers, tools, wobbly towers of empty Amazon boxes and just plain junk. Or, as the artist Olivia Erlanger and the architect Luis Ortega Govela described it in “Garage,” their 2018 book: “the American consumer’s preferred landfill.”
The mythology of the garage’s reimagined potential runs deep in modern American culture. For businesses like Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Mattel, Disney and Harley-Davidson, the garage is the backdrop of their origin story. Those companies’ founders took that common, square structure that was originally built to house a certain vision of American success and transformed it to house their own version of the American dream.
It’s hard to estimate how many garages are reutilized, especially because many people close off their garages and turn them into climate-controlled rooms. In sprawling cities like Houston, garage makeovers have become professionalized, with businesses offering remodels with shiny epoxy flooring, lights, and anything else the owner envisions. Epoxy floor coatings can start at around $1,500 for a two-car garage, but there’s no upper limit to what people spend on their garage once their imagination takes flight.
Those visions tend to carry with them a sense of transgressive excitement about using the garage in a creative way. “They feel liberated from the expectation of using the room as it was designed because a garage has no rules,” Ms. Erlanger said.
Other rooms have less malleable uses: Kitchens have appliances, for example, and bathrooms have a toilet. By contrast, the garage is just an empty canvas without any rules, where it’s OK to be messy and dirty. As the lyrics to one Weezer song go, “In the garage I feel safe, no one cares about my ways.”
“There really is no right or wrong use of the garage,” Ms. Erlanger said. “It offers a freedom that’s missing from the rest of the home that people seem to be craving.”
On another night in another part of Houston, the artist Jamie Sterling Pitt, 47, was wrapping up a creation session with his fellow artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez in his own converted garage: an art studio with a carpentry corner and in-progress works scattered throughout, plus a mini fridge full of Topo Chico seltzer water and Tecate beer. His truck was parked in the driveway.
“One of the best parts of being an artist in Houston is the space,” he said, adding, as he brushed mosquitoes off his legs, that the humidity of the outdoors contributes to his nature-oriented work. “Excess space is a dream in most places, like New York City, but here it is attached to your home, and with some creativity you can turn it into a work space, or a chill spot, or anything you can imagine.”
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