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A garage in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The Hermitage garage
by Nicholas II in The State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

A residential garage is part of a home, or an associated building, designed or used for storing a vehicle or vehicles. In some places the term is used synonymously with "carport", though that term normally describes a structure that is not completely enclosed.

Australian residential garages[link]

Australian homes typically have a one, one and a half or double car garage, with some newer houses having a triple garage, with one double door and one single door. Prior to the 1970's most of them were detached from the house, usually set further back with the driveway leading up past the side of the house, common with old fibreboard houses, but not uncommon with earlier brick houses. The most common doors on these garages were either 2 wooden barn style doors with a standard sized access door on the side of the garage, or the B&D Rolla Door, which is described below.

The most common garage door to date in Australia is the B&D Rolla Door, having been around since 1956 and still in heavy use today. They are a corrugated flexible but strong sheet steel door, sliding up tracks and rolling around a drum mounted above the door opening on the inside of the garage. These come in manual and remote controlled electric (known as the Controll-a-Door), with conversion kits available.

Locking is provided by a key lock in the centre of the door moving two square sliding lock bars in and out of holes in the door tracks, locking and unlocking it, or by the solenoid lock in the automatic motor. Newer homes feature more American styled tilting panel lift doors which slide up onto a track on the ceiling via a motor and chain drive. Since the late 70's most if not all garages are attached, and throughout the 80's it became more common to have an access door into the home from the garage where design permitted, whereas it is commonplace now. Most older unit (apartment) blocks in Australia have garages on the ground floor accessible through a common hallway and access doors, all leading into a common driveway. Newer ones now have underground parking.

British residential garages[link]

Up-and-over garage door

Insulation of Sectional garage door

British homes featuring a garage typically have a single or double garage either built into the main building, detached within the grounds (often in the back garden), or in a communal area. As the typical size of a family car has increased significantly over recent decades, some garages are no longer adequate for the purpose of parking a vehicle and increasingly the garage is used as a general storage space.

The common term for these structures in the first decades of the Twentieth Century was motor house. Traditionally, garage doors were wooden, opening either as two leaves or sliding horizontally. Newer garages are fitted with metal up-and-over doors. Increasingly, in new homes, such doors are electrically operated.

Typically, a small British single garage is 8 by 16 feet (2.4 × 4.9 m), a medium single garage is 9 by 18 feet (2.7 × 5.5 m), and a large single garage is 10 by 20 feet (3.0 × 6.1 m). Family saloons have become bigger than they were in the past, so the larger size has become a preferred option. A typical large family car like the Ford Mondeo is about 15 by 6 feet (4.6 × 1.8 m), meaning that even with the larger size garage, it is necessary to park to one side to be able to open the driver's door wide enough to enter or exit the vehicle.

United States residential garages[link]

A modern one-car garage, in the USA.

In most American single family and town houses featuring a garage, the garage has a door on the side of the building for vehicles to enter and exit. Many garage doors open upward using an electric chain drive, which can often be remotely controlled from the resident's vehicle with a small radio transmitter. Garages are connected to the nearest road with a driveway. Interior space for one or two cars is typical, and garages built since the 1960s typically have a door directly connecting the garage to the interior of the house (an "attached garage"). Earlier garages were often detached and located in the back yard of the house, accessed either via a long driveway or from an alley.

In the past, garages were often separate buildings from the house ("detached garage"), almost resembling modern sheds. On occasion, a garage would be built with an apartment above it, which could be rented out. As automobiles became more popular, the idea of attaching the garage directly to the home grew into a common practice. While a person with a separate garage must walk outdoors in any type of weather, a person with an attached garage has a much shorter walk inside a building.

Garages are often found where the attic entrance is located. Also used to store tools, bicycles, lawn mowers and other such items, most garages have unfinished concrete floors. Since they are heavily used for storage, and as work space for home improvement projects, some home owners do not use their garage to store their car, preferring a carport as an alternative solution.. Some garages contain a separate storage room to partially alleviate this problem.

Around the turn of the 21st century, companies began offering "portable garages" in the United States. Mostly, these garages are made of metal and do not attach to the current house or other structure, much like the garages built prior to the 1960's. Many homeowner's associations frown upon the installation of these nonconforming buildings, but still, their popularity are every growing.

Garage flooring companies can install flooring products that are not generally available to the home owner providing a coating system that will last may years. Theses include epoxies, polyurethanes,polyaspartics and modular garage tiles to name a few.

Garage Door companies often install or repair garage doors, as the process can be dangerous and requires a great deal of technical skill to complete safely and correctly. Garage doors come in manual and automatic variants. Both manual and automatic garage doors operate on spring tension. With time and extensive use, these springs get weak and break. Replacing the springs is a very dangerous procedure due to the large force these springs carry.

Notable garages[link]

Hewlett-Packard of the Silicon Valley started its business in a garage. That garage is now a landmark.^[1]

Gallery of special garages[link]

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  1919

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  1938

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Carhouse/Car Barns[link]

Garages in the United States and Canada used to store streetcars and buses are often referred to as carhouse or car barn. These storage facilities are either metal or brick structures used to store streetcars or buses away from the elements. In Britain they are referred to as bus depot or depot.

See also[link]

Look up garage in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Garage

• Parking
• Carport

References[link]

Garage house^[1] is a subgenre of electronic dance music emerged in New York City and New Jersey during the early to mid 1980s and popularized in discothèques like Paradise Garage and Zanzibar.^[2]

DJs playing this genre include Junior Vasquez, Tony Humphries and Larry Levan.^[3][4]

Subgenres of garage house include speed garage, which incorporates the elements of drum and bass, and the British variant called UK garage.^[5]

History[link]

After the collapse of disco music in the late 1970s, dance music became overwhelmed with synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines. Therefore these said musical instruments were and are an essential part of garage music.^[6] The direction of garage house was primarily influenced by the New York-based discothèque Paradise Garage where the influential DJ Larry Levan played records.^[3]

According to Blues & Soul, garage house started with the early records of Visual, e.g., "The Music Got Me" in 1983 and the material of The Peech Boys.^[7]

Characteristics[link]

In comparsion to house music, garage house has more polished attributes, including gospel-influenced piano riffs and female vocals.^[5]

The genre was popular in the 1980s in the U.S. and 1990s in the United Kingdom. Popularity of the genre in the UK gave birth to UK garage, a British variant of garage house.^[5]

Artists[link]

Prominent labels[link]

See also[link]

• dance-pop
• hi-NRG
• house
• deep house

References[link]