Park ‘N’ Hide

The garage, which got star billing in America’s postwar suburbs as keeper of the all-important automobile, enters the next century much as it began this one: taking a back seat to the house.

Drive through some of Southern California’s newest neighborhoods, and it’s clear the garage is experiencing a decline in status.

Growing numbers of architects and home builders, after prominently displaying the garage in the front of homes for more than a half-century, have begun hiding it in an effort to reclaim neighborhoods from the car and bring life back to the streets.

It’s a stab at re-creating what are considered to be some of the Los Angeles area’s great neighborhoods: Pasadena, Santa Monica and the Wilshire district.

Those communities are also some of the Southland’s oldest, developed before World War II and the onset of America’s obsession with the automobile, which secured the garage a prime location in the suburban home.

“During the postwar years, everyone was proud of the car,” Santa Barbara architect Barry Berkus said. “You celebrated the weekend by washing your long taillights and fins in the driveway.”

But times have changed. Architects are designing neighborhoods that de-emphasize the garage to deal with a very modern problem: shrinking land availability. Builders have found they can fit more homes in new neighborhoods by playing with the garage.

Grouping homes in clusters, for example, allows four to six of them to share a common driveway, with half of the homes with alley-access garages and the remainder featuring more traditional, front-entrance ones.

“It’s a very efficient use of land,” said San Jose architect Rob Steinberg, who designed Brookfield Homes’ Glenneyre at Lanes End, an award-winning cluster-style project in Irvine.

Most pronounced in the wealthy enclaves of Orange County, the trend toward downplaying the garage has spread across Southern California in recent years:

* At a development in Newport Beach, homeowners drive down landscaped alleys to get to garages behind homes. In another neighborhood a few miles away, cars pass through porte-cocheres, covered gateways that lead to detached rear garages.

* In Redondo Beach, a developer is building 98 detached homes on top of a street-level parking garage, which will be fronted by retail shops.

* In Rancho Cucamonga, detached garages are tucked behind Craftsman-style homes in an affordable housing development.

This is not to say that garages are no longer being built at the front of homes or that buyers no longer find them useful.

Garage Considered a Necessity

In fact, according to Gopal Ahluwalia of the National Assn. of Home Builders, not only do most buyers consider the garage a necessity, but, through the years, the garage has steadily grown in size.

In 1970, for example, 30% of all new homes were built with garages large enough for two cars or more. A decade later, that figure had jumped to 56%, and hovered at 72% in the first three quarters of 1999.

Home builders are also constructing garages with more depth and height to accommodate bulky sport utility vehicles.

And increasingly they are hearing buyers demand space for a third car or more, which has given rise to a new set of challenges. “You can’t put three garages in front without the whole house looking like a parking garage,” Ahluwalia said.

Consequently, some builders have begun splitting up the garage by putting a two-car garage in front of the home and building a third space that runs parallel to the home.

Or they are building what appears to be a two-car garage that holds three vehicles by including a tandem space deep enough to fit two cars.

But often these super-garages aren’t housing autos at all. Instead, they are being used as holding pens for lawn mowers, jet skis and other household belongings.

Ahluwalia cited one study that found only 13% of residents with homes with a three-car garage or bigger used it to park three cars, with nearly half of them using the space for one or no cars.

As garages grow in size, however, so too has the desire to make them less obvious. New emphasis is being put on the home itself and the surrounding landscaping. Front porches have also made a big comeback.

Garages Are in Back of the House

That’s the case at the Newport Beach community of Balboa at One Ford Road, named best residential detached-home project of 1999 at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference. Built by Pacific Bay Homes, the homes range in size from 1,960 to 2,900 square feet and are priced from $668,000 to $985,000.

The garages at Balboa are in back of the home and reached through alleys. Small yards are tucked between bungalows that feature spacious front porches accented with plenty of flowers and trees. The effect: a garage-free street.

A shift by many local governments toward neo-traditional homes is helping to fuel the trend toward what are called “alley-load” garages, according to Lorry Lynn of the Meyers Group in Irvine, which does consulting work for new-home builders.

“The idea is to get people to interact more,” Lynn said. “And that type of architecture and land planning encourages interaction.”

The trend harks back to an era when neighbors gardened and socialized in the frontyard. Early cars were stored in special backyard sheds used mostly to dry clothes and accept deliveries of coal.

But as the car gained in popularity, the front porch was replaced by what one urban planner has described as “the cult of the backyard.”

And, during the 1930 and 1940s, as manufacturers began making automobiles that emitted fewer odors and caught fire less often, the car began inching closer to the house.

This brought on a debate about how best to blend the garage into the home. Should it be displayed or hidden?

The former argument largely won, with the popularity of the open-air carport during the 1940s and 1950s offering further proof of Americans’ desire to glorify the automobile. But now architects are hiding the garage again.

Does Reviving Trend Make Sense?

It remains to be seen if reviving an old trend in a new age makes sense, however. Many new developments that feature rear garages, for example, have brought back the front porch, where people used to sit in the evenings as they waited for their homes to cool.

Whether porches will actually get widespread use in an era of air-conditioning is unclear, according to Berkus, the Santa Barbara-based architect, who contends that frontporches have become as ubiquitous in the front of new homes as the garages they replaced.

Critics contend that building garages behind homes cuts into yard space and requires more concrete. Alley-load garages also leave entrances to two sides of the home exposed.

That’s not the case, however, at the Wyndover Bay development in Newport Beach, where homeowners pass through gated porte-cocheres as wide as a single car and drive to rear courtyards and detached three-car garages.

One plan offers a covered second-story walkway that connects the master bedroom of themain house to a bonus room built over the garage. Homes sell for an average of $1 million and are spread over 4,000 square feet.

For his family, Tom Redwitz, senior vice president of Laguna Hills-based Taylor Woodrow Homes, builders of Wyndover Bay, chose a home in the development with a ground-level covered walkway that leads to the garage.

Other Subtle Changes Noted

As he walked through his neighborhood on a recent afternoon, Redwitz highlighted other subtle touches: streets that narrow at points to slow traffic, and, in a nod to Pasadena’s great neighborhoods, strips of trees and grass that act as buffers between the sidewalk and street.

“What we really want to create are timeless neighborhoods,” Redwitz said. “We want trees and homes to dominate the street, not concrete and garage doors.”

Encouraged by their success in Orange County, home builders have begun experimenting with garages in communities across Southern California.

Pacific Bay Homes, for example, is building three-car garages with tandem spaces at two projects in the Santa Clarita Valley.

One model features separate garage doors, opening to the rear of the lot, that provide access for boats.

“What started in Orange County has now made its way up to Santa Clarita,” said Glen K. Yamamoto of Pacific Bay’s Valencia office.

In Rancho Cucamonga, meanwhile, developers are building homes with front porches and detached rear garages to help revitalize an aging, neglected neighborhood.

Northtown Housing Development Corp., a local nonprofit agency, built the homes to reflect the Craftsman-style architecture of the predominantly Latino surrounding neighborhood.

New Homes Preserve Traditional Feel

“Even though they’re new homes, they have preserved the traditional feel of the neighborhood,” said Denise Mejia, who purchased a 1,600-square-foot home in 1998 for $134,000. “They don’t take away from what was already here.”

Others, however, have set their sights on creating something altogether different.

San Jose architect Steinberg has designed a project being built just off the Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach that banishes the garage even farther from the home. Cars at 1800 PCH will be parked in a street-level structure fronted by half-a-dozen retail shops.

Plans call for 98 single-family detached homes to be built directly on top of the garage, with the front portion being used for retail and guest parking and the secured back portion reserved for residents. The homes, which range from 1,400 to 1,800 square feet and cost between $350,000 to $425,000, will be connected through a series of walkways.

“By warehousing the cars, it allows the residential portion of the project to be car-free and pedestrian-friendly,” said Avi Brosh of the Braemar Group.

“It’s almost like a movie set since it will have no driveways, no garage doors and no streets.”