HOME DESIGN : Garages Nowadays, They House Almost Everything Except Cars

When future archeologists sift through the residential rubble of what was once Orange County, chances are they will find little evidence that garages were supposed to house cars.

Instead, they will find offices and wood shops and fitness centers, rehearsal studios, billiard rooms, boatyards, artist studios.

In Corona del Mar, 400 cases of vintage wine sit in an insulated, thermostatically controlled garage “wine cellar.”

In Santa Ana, students take singing lessons in a garage dominated by a baby grand piano.

And in Westminster, an elderly couple fight off loneliness by holding open house in the garage they have converted into a mini-den. They sit on a couch and watch television with the garage door wide open so that anyone passing by, including the mail carrier, can stop in for a visit and a chat.

For many families trying to squeeze into tiny Orange County tract homes, the garage has taken the place of the basement or attic for hobbies, recreation and storage. Beloved paraphernalia piles up year after year until the garage begins to look like ground zero at a swap meet explosion. There never seems to be enough room . . . especially to park a car.

“I’ve never put a car in the garage, so I don’t know what it’s like,” says Kathy Putney of Costa Mesa.

Instead of the standard two cars, Putney’s garage is filled with the family’s workout equipment, her 16-year-old son’s silk-screening rig and her own custom gift basket business. Dozens of fun items, such as exotic pastas and perfumed bubble bath, are arranged on hand-made shelving for her clients to browse through.

In Fullerton, all four cars belonging to Sandor Demlinger’s family are parked on the street.

“The last time there was a car in this garage was 16 years ago when the previous owner drove hers out of it,” he laughs. The two-car garage now houses a photographic darkroom, two kilns for baking ceramic mugs and tiles, and a 24-foot-long, hand-crafted model railway.

“A car is just something to have if you need to go somewhere,” he says. “But you gotta have a garage. If I didn’t have one, I’d have to buy a bigger house.”

Demlinger, a Chicago native, sees no problem with leaving cars out in the weather. “You call this weather?” he deadpans. “Where I come from, ‘snow’ is weather.”

Bruce Kaplan, who manages Universal Gym Equipment in Irvine, says he was concerned about the family cars when he and his wife, Donna, a personal trainer, converted the garage on their new house in El Toro three years ago to a deluxe gym.

“I drive a company car, so I didn’t worry too much about leaving it outside all the time,” he says. “But Donna has a brand new Honda Prelude. In the end, though, she decided that she wanted a gym more than she wanted a garage.”

The Kaplans work out for at least two hours each day in their mini fitness center. With its soft lighting, mirrored walls, gray carpeting and wall-to-wall collection of computerized treadmills, rowing machines and multistation weight machines, the gym looks more like a private club than a garage.

Although all new single-family homes in Orange County are required to come with two-car garages, three-car garages are now almost routine, even for affordable housing.

Newport Beach developer Gary Fudge doubts that many of the families who opt for three-car garages actually have three cars to park in them, even though they pay a premium for the extra space.

“Home buyers view garage space as cheaper living space,” he says.

Although automobiles had been around since the mid-1880s, the word garage (from the French garer, meaning to shelter or dock a vessel) did not appear in the language until about 1902. Until then, these “horseless carriages” had been housed out in the stables along with the other carriages.

As the smell from the horses diminished, the carriage house was moved closer and closer to the main building. By the turn of the century, structures designed specifically for automobiles had begun to appear.

“Between 1900 and 1905, you begin to have examples of garages actually being attached to the dwelling,” says David Gebhard, a professor of architectural history at UC Santa Barbara. Because the concept of a service station was still a long time off, turn-of-the-century garages were built as small service stations unto themselves, complete with oil pits, a workshop and gasoline storage tanks.

In the 1930s, modernist architects reworked the old porte-cochere into a carport, a term that Frank Lloyd Wright is credited with coining.

Gebhard dismisses the notion that Wright invented the term but concedes that he popularized it.

The modernists’ architectural legacy was the integration of the carport--and eventually the garage--into the total design of the house, a concept that has been integral to home design ever since. California designer Cliff May is credited with perfecting the ranch house design in part by moving the garage from the back to the front yard and attaching it to the house.

What you can or can’t use your garage for in Orange County is governed by each city’s zoning and nuisance ordinances and building codes, which differ only slightly from one city to the next.

Most simply state that a garage is meant for the housing of automobiles. Some specify that a waiver or variance has to be obtained for it to be used otherwise. Others preclude any serious conversion by prohibiting structural changes that would interfere with the garage’s ability to house its full complement of automobiles.

In practice, however, what homeowners do with their garages is governed by what they can get away with. As Anaheim Code Enforcement Manager John Poole puts it: “We don’t go out looking for code violations. We just respond to complaints.”

Most complaints are about businesses being run out of garages.

Although few cities specifically outlaw such operations, some of these enterprises inevitably butt heads with the local nuisance ordinances. Employees taking up neighborhood parking, delivery vehicles rumbling up the street, a steady flow of customers and noise from machinery are all an invitation for a code-enforcement crackdown. But most cities simply turn a blind eye if the business does not interfere with the residential neighborhood.

For many small businesses, rent-free garage space can mean the difference between success and failure.

“With the cost of real estate these days, your garage becomes something worthless if you just put a car in there,” says photographer Steve Francis of Fullerton, who has converted his parents’ garage into a darkroom and office.

Since he does most of his photography on location, he sees no point in paying 100% rent on premises he uses only 25% of the time. “My business is still growing,” he says. “If all of a sudden you kicked in $1,200 rent plus all the other mumbo-jumbo, I’d be living off rice cakes.”

In fact, Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak, the whiz-kid co-founders of Apple Computers, worked out of the Jobs family garage in Cupertino for six months before moving to commercial premises down the street.

“As an artist, I have to do whatever I can to get the rent paid,” says Kurt Schmidt of Costa Mesa. Schmidt uses his one-car garage as a studio where he works on his canvases and his commercial faux-finish pieces. But he doubles up by renting the space to a friend who has nowhere to park his classic pink-and-white ’54 Buick Century station wagon.

“I park the car in the driveway during the day while I work and then bring it in at night,” he says.

Richard Tellinghuisen, operations director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum and a painter in his own right, says he found it difficult to find studio space in Orange County, so he works out of his garage on a quiet cul-de-sac in El Toro.

“If we had moved into Mission Viejo or Irvine, I would never be able to have a studio,” he points out. “I would have to have my car in there all the time.”

Indeed, the newer planned communities are notorious for ensuring that cars are parked in garages and not on the street.

In Irvine, there is even an ordinance that limits the time a garage door can be left open to four hours. And unlike most city zoning departments, the Irvine homeowners’ associations have the manpower to enforce their bylaws.

Meanwhile, older cities around the county are struggling with a surge in bootleg apartments in garages, due in part to the high cost of housing. These units range from cozy bungalows for distressed family members to slum-like rental apartments for desperate aliens. The slipshod quality of many of these dwellings pose health and safety hazards that concern local zoning inspectors.

In early 1988, the city of Laguna Beach cracked down on more than 275 illegal units which it inherited when South Laguna was annexed to the city. Many of them were garage conversions, and almost all of them posed some kind of hazard, from faulty electrical wiring to primitive plumbing and sanitation.

“People had hooked up gas lines themselves that had obviously never been inspected,” says City Manager Kenneth C. Frank. “Many of the units did not meet requirements for windows, ventilation or heating equipment. And they certainly didn’t meet parking requirements, which is a problem in Laguna Beach’s congested neighborhoods.”

The city had been alerted to the existence of the bootleg units by complaints from neighbors. Ultimately, what you do in your garage has a lot to do with how your neighbors feel about it. And more than anything else, noise is the surest way to turn neighbors sour.

Countless school bands and nascent rock groups face the problem every time they take over the family garage for a rehearsal. Many professional musicians find it worth the investment to build elaborate double-walled sound studios complete with insulation and high-tech acoustics. Others, like Beverly and Duane Williams, just happen to play what the neighbors like.

Their five-member rock group, called “Beverly & Duane,” rehearses at the Williamses home in a quiet-- very quiet-- Tustin neighborhood twice a week.

“They have never had a complaint from the neighbors,” says their manager, James Johnson. “In fact, the neighbors often come out to listen. They sit on their lawns, have a couple of beers and enjoy the music.”

Indeed, many of the homes in the neighborhood have cars parked in the driveway. It makes you wonder what is behind those garage doors.