I received an e-mail a few months ago from a reader (amazing) which I lost (not amazing), but have somehow remembered (truly amazing). It went something like this:
Dear Suzy,
You are by far the best writer in the world. I read your column and clip it every week, sending copies of it to all my big time publisher friends in New York City who think you’re wonderful and are dying to syndicate your column worldwide for several million dollars a week. I’m sure you are also stunningly beautiful, generous to a fault, a great singer, and careful about what you eat.
Here’s my question: I have an attached one-car garage which I want to turn into a den. But the last thing I want is for this remodel to look like what it is: a garage conversion. What can I do? I’ll be your devoted slave forever and give you my Range Rover with a 10-year maintenance contract if you will help me.
I Adore You, Mel Gibson
Dear Mel,
When I was growing up amid the industrial emissions in La Porte, Texas, my mom got her hair teased at a beauty shop located in a converted garage. We drove right up the driveway in the Buick Skylark, hoping we would stop before we went through the sliding glass door and smashed into the sink and hair dryer. It seemed every house in the neighborhood had a similar conversion, home to a different business: small appliance repair, sand candle maker, seamstress, and (yuk) taxidermy. And every home business looked the same, with a driveway running right into a sliding glass door.
To truly transform your garage, forget the sliding glass door, jack up the driveway and landscape the area, and while you’re at it, nix the orange shag carpeting and the flimsy, fake paneling. Whatever you do, don’t frame up a wall within the garage door opening, leaving the garage door jam in place like some schmucks do as a ghostly outline of the doorway’s former function. And don’t stick an ugly aluminum carport off the front of the ex-garage, especially since you won’t have a Range Rover to worry over anymore.
Try to think of the space as though you are adding it on anew. How would you design it from this perspective? Where would the windows be if you weren’t trying to fit them under existing headers? What sort of architectural interest — columns, partitions, exposed beams, a clear-story cupola-thing, leaky skylights — can you add to alter the rectangular interior space so you don’t feel like you’re a stunned bird awaiting recovery in a shoebox? What about a porch off the back or front?
Alternatively, you could actually embrace the automotive motif. Install a glass-paned garage door, hang hubcaps on the ceiling, and put the couch on a lift. Tuck a little bar in the corner and serve all the liquor out of squirting oil cans. Use floor jacks for end tables and hide the TV/stereo in a cabinet that looks like one of those machines that tests your headlights. Stick up a couple of girlie posters and call it home. And if you tell anyone I gave you this advice, I’ll just say I don’t remember.
This article appears in September 19 • 1997 and September 19 • 1997 (Cover).