Garage doors are often one of the ugliest features on the exterior of a house. There are now quite a few “carriage house” type doors to choose from that look much better than the traditional flat or raised panel doors. But those special doors come at a significant cost increase. There are other solutions you might want to consider.

    Garage doors are often an unsightly feature simply because of their scale. We human beings tend to prefer objects that are an appropriate size or scale to our own size. The doors and windows of your house will be most appealing when they are size-appropriate to the people who will occupy the house. They will “express” an interaction with other people. On a subconscious level, we can emotionally connect with architectural features like that. Garage doors must, by their very nature, be sized and scaled to the automobiles that must pass through them. Garage doors end up being the largest doors on your house. We find them unattractive for that very reason.

    Being true to his sardonic nature, Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant vines.” It’s a clever line, but vines can serve a greater purpose for architects than simply camouflaging errors. They can be useful elements that can be integrated into the architecture. Here is an example of vines used to soften the visual impact of three, blank garage doors in an otherwise featureless portion of a house.

Pergola with Vines above Garage Doors

    Okay, here’s the answer to “Dream House Fumble #1.”    

    Really, there were a few things you could have criticized. But the thing that caught my attention and can make an otherwise decent house design end up sour and off-key was the mismatch of the arched opening in the brick wall and the arch of the garage door windows.

    The brick wall is expensive enough and the cast limestone jamb and head of the gargar door opening is even more costly, but the garage door is not unique in any way. These kinds of door come with standard arch shapes and they can not be easily customized. What should have happened here is the builder or architect should have found out the radius of the window arch, then determined the distance from the top of the window to the bottom of the cast stone arch. He then should have added that distance to the window arch radius to find the proper radius for the cast stone arch. The cast stone is easily customized. The result is that the two arches would have been concentric and looked appropriate for each other instead of  being as out of whack as they are.

    One of my favorite sources for cast stone is Classic Cast Stone at http://www.classiccaststone.com/.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

    I promised you a photo quiz from time to time, so here’s your first one. In house design, often, the details can make a decent house awkward and “just not right.” I took this photo of a house I drove by the other day. The question for you is to try to see what I found so bad about these garage doors. I’ll post my answer for you tomorrow.

Bill Hirsch    

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com