Underused garage becomes dream transformer home amid patios

my parents were getting older and they were having health issues they finally agreed to come down and live with us and so we kept looking for two on ones two little homes in the urban core but since my parents wanted a traditional house we kept going further and further from the san diego core and coming out to the outskirts and my mother and father fell in love with this house of course there was no secondary house the lot is large enough that we could have built another house possibly in the back but rather than do something like that they just made more sense to just reuse the garage space for a home because it was a large garage space and to be honest the space inside the garage was larger than anything we had ever lived in before so when you came it was a four-car garage yes it was a four-car garage and it was just a normal garage with absolutely no insulation and nothing about it that you would consider to be home like but we really liked modern spaces and so we liked our drawings are offered by our architects and went with their vision of putting a house inside a house yeah it's not like a regular garage it's like a rack with a lot of flexibility yeah this is the garage the style is like an industrial style like everything is visible we keep the garage door have like a really nice inside and yeah everything is open it's flexible like there is like a lot of movement that we can see so they have a box in the middle so that box is like a swiss army knife where everything can open or can close so here is like a table that you can fold and you can have the chair there so you can get here you can work here so the best pair part of that is of course you you don't use the the space until you need the space and then you pull up the the table and yeah you can use the space for for something else in that case also we have the island this is just more classic we have an island that you can move that dimension is the dimension of the hallway so you can move the island and you can display the island wherever you want [Music] so we are in san diego the weather is like all year spring so you can have parties here outside yeah it's a really nice relation interior stereo putting a house inside a house allowed us to put a lot of hidden storage on all four spaces of the wall of the house inside the garage space and it still has kind of a house-like look on the inside which is cute also it makes people feel homey and we selected wood because we like the idea of the house looking or feeling more organic than could have been if we just used some kind of modern material that would be less warm they didn't want to see the microwave so there is like a another element that you can move is connected to the electrical and then you have the microwave here so you can use the microwave you can close it and then you put it there or you have a party and you can use that to have your your beer you can disconnect from the electricity and you can have that element wherever you want to have it so the most conventional piece of this is probably this living room yeah i can imagine they wanted to feel like at home more like a classic traditional traditional home where you sit down in a sofa you switch on the tv and you see the tv right it's like more like a traditional one yeah this is something that we have been thinking a lot is like we have seen like a lot of house that they are typical one living room one kitchen one room two room or three room that was thought in the 50s for the typical family where they have like a one father one mother one kid two kids three kids but we are not living in that way anymore there is like a different kind of families right now and depending on the of the moment of the life you are you are living in different ways so you our life change every five years every ten years because you get married because you debart because you have a a kid you have to the kid got to call it your grandpa your grandma go to live with you but our house never change and we already believe that architecture need to change with your life yeah this is the boxes that they can be like i started but also you can use that as a as a place to sit down you want to you want to sit down so it's like all of them you can use all of things so you can move all of things so you can use this as a storage or you can use as a stool you have a big party with friend here again it's like giving them opportunities to leave the space in the way that they want to sleep the space if we could everything would fold and hide and be out of the way i would love it if all the furniture were eventually on wheels and it could all be reconfigured in any way we want you can see how a smooth go so this is like yeah everything goes like really smooth because there is a spring so i'm not doing anything just a spring really strong spring the only thing that was sort of new to us was that because of the pandemic we had to figure out a place to put the the desk space because we had to start working from home and so that was a change but even that ended up working out for us because all the shelving in the walls allowed me to hide all the clutter of what would be an office space so even though there's a lot of wires it worked out but i didn't think my home would become an office so that is a surprise that's not something i would have expected and wanted to do it but we made it work as well so in the in the in the middle of the box we have the we have the bathroom we have the kitchen and we have a different tool that we were talking talking about and there is a contract with materials so here everything is like warm here everything is like cold so this is the bar room here we have two doors so you can have access for from like two side of the of the house we don't have a window here because we are in the middle of the house so what we have is three skylight so you can see here you can see the sky and you can have a really nice shower seeing the sky and seeing the cloud the floors the floor is the same floor that we have in the garage it's like a micro cement and it's totally contrast with the tile that we have here that is a glass style that reflect the light that we have here it's a totally different light in the morning and in the afternoon this bathroom is huge yeah the first thing is the bathroom is huge but it's not only because of the dimension of the bathroom also because of the light we don't have any artificial light everything is like just natural light and this is right now like in the afternoon like six seven we are it's like six pm and this is a really amazing light here also the tile reflect the light that we have it's in the highlight so there is even more light yeah so what's the idea of putting the lights just inside of the skylight so when it's night time the effect is similar yeah the idea is like instead of having the light here on the ceiling having the light inside of the skylight when you are here during the night you don't realize that this artificial light so it's again in that case it's like a you don't see the you see the light you just see that the reflection of the light on the wall it's like a really cost effective element it's just a strip led light that you can buy any hardware soap like 10 dollar light that you just glue there so it's like a really simple gap just to hide it to hide the light so we have here another light that is integrated with the playgroup again it's like really simple you are doing like a groot here and you have the led so i i really love the color turquoise and even though it's an extravagant expense to fill all the walls with glass tile i wanted to feel like i was inside an aquarium so just the idea of sort of being enclosed in this space that feels watery and so i have that feeling now when i'm in here because the skylights allow you to sort of see up to the sky that you feel kind of warmly protected by this soft color on the outside and then even though i'm worried about getting older and being able to get around i really want a bathtub and so this one space in the corner here is reserved for that because i just want to sort of just dip into it and it's designed so that the floors look a little bigger than they are the color of the tile is similar to the cement itself so there's a continuity the glass itself allows you to see through the showers itself slightly underneath the skylight and all of those things make you feel like you're in a very large but enclosed space where you're in a bathroom so it's great and what i want to do is eventually be in the bathtub taking a bath in this space and feeling again just really cozy this is one of my favorite spaces it's weird to say the bathroom is one of your favorite spaces but it is so the way the the space functions we we wanted to be able to separate out uh rooms so if we had guests staying here you know we could easily make that space be partitioned often here we have that door that are integrated it's just a simple play good with a wheel unrail and you can close this on open and you we have that in both sides of the of the box so you can have like a unique space that is completely open or you can close here you can close in the other side and you have like a regular a room that yeah you can have your privacy you know so you go here and because you have access from both sides to the to to the bathroom you can use like yeah like both hallways we have here like another street led light that you don't realize that is there until you switch in the light it is nice and a nice effect also to see the roof here yeah very open right yeah it's like here we have you have two options you can close but you are going to have a really volumetric space so a really classic idea is just you paying everything on white and you enjoy the hate that you have here and also because we have a skylight that you can open inspirable skylight so they they have like a lot of cross ventilation and they don't have ac and they don't have a heater even the insulation is like a really high insulation in the roof and with the cross ventilation that we have here is enough in summer just to to be cool here also because there is a lot of green garden and because of that so they don't have any ac here in the in the space we're lucky that the weather in our area in the san diego county is just gorgeous and so we can often just leave the door open like this and feeling like we're still partly outdoors it's nice because you can take advantage of what was already here the garage door and yeah like indoor outdoor oh yeah and one of the things that mattered to us was that we did not need to depend on air conditioning to survive because that's the reality of the southwest that is often very expensive and also leads to the failure of the electrical grid so we have designed a house here with the help of our architects that allows the sea breezes to naturally come through the house so by opening up these double doors in the back double doors in the front the garage doors there's really great breezes that come through and allow us to cool the house quickly we also went out and invested in good insulation so that the house itself is resilient to be able to withstand some of the heat that can happen on super hot days and because we have a cement floor and it's not being touched on by the sun most of the time as long as we keep the shades down we're also keeping the heat from radiating and the floor itself keeps things cool in the house again i love that the floor just continues yeah they wanted to keep everything as they have in that case that was micro swimming and they wanted to keep the micro swimming in the space i like this sort of barn feeling yeah yeah at the beginning is like we have here instead of that we have here like a sliding walls but they didn't like it and they decide not to keep it so this is a shoe rack or bow tie rack so here you can yeah have your your socks have your your tie this is just like good with a really simple wheel that allows you to keep everything organized so everything is a custom a small cabinet closet they are all living like there is like a lot of space a lot of space here they have like a lot of space above so yeah there is like a lot of storage yeah so here you can you can open and there is all the utilities and we can see how we have like a double insulation there so as we say like the box inside of the box is a cool space in summer and it's a long space in winter yeah and all the utilities is there so in case that there is like a pipe rock or something like that it's really simple to come in and fix it and you had a wall here before but you decided that didn't work you know we had thought to partition this space out and it still could do that so everything is set up so we could actually continue to separate this space and create two bedrooms back here if you wanted to but right now there's only two of us so we don't need a second bedroom and we just decided to keep a big open space because we like the open clean spaces and there already is a murphy bed so if we had a guest it doesn't really affect us because they could stay over there but because my parents have their own house there's two other bedrooms right across the patio from us and if there was overflow needed we have it here and we're also still thinking about what we'll do in the future because we ended up installing these three sheds there's no longer a garage so that's your garage now yes that's the only garage we need but even back here we have a vision of what the future could be like because let's say we had to have other relatives live with us or if we wanted to somehow be a place for older people like our older friends well we have a shed that easily converts into an extra bedroom and yet another shed that converts into a bedroom and if we finish off the walls in there insulate we're going to have electricity passing through here then those become two more bedrooms and so we can have a communal kitchen right here in the main space right now one of the sheds is functioning as my partner's studio he does ceramics and the other shade is serving as an informal nursery so that we can grow some of the plants and trees that we're still experimenting with what grows well here because of the climate and we're creating long-term plans and hopefully some of these trees will be extremely mature eventually and there'll be even more shade back here and everything is water with tanks so they have old tanks here so they collect the water from the from the root but also they have a recycling system so they can recycle the water so they have a water tank here and they have water tank in the house so all the house that they are using in the house and the garage they recycle and they use for the garden even back here we want to continue to pull in more of the water right now the water that is being collected is being pulled from the north side of the building so all the rain water goes to those rain tanks but on the south side it's being lost to the driveway and we want to put an underground cistern and then all of the water would continually drip irrigate all of the garden space we're still trying to make the space be less cement and more of a park in a garden space it's it's it's kind of like two houses but this was the garage it was detached yeah that was a detached garage this is the main house and other spaces in between the two houses so this is where is the gathering in between the family and where the owner wanted to create is a different landscape here more tropical so this could also be a front door besides this yeah let's say that you have like two front doors this is more like the relation with the with the family i love this planner yeah this is like a really simple box i also like that it's just bungee cords yeah nothing nothing fancy nothing like expensive is just yeah fancy course yeah you can have the plan above so you have you have the opportunity to use that space as you want more flexibility so you have things on the ceiling you have things on the box you can do whatever you want in the space that is in between the house it still can function as a garage so if we ever had to leave the house is still viable to having this room for guests in the back and you can still function with having a car rolling into the garage we have an electric car now and because we have electric car we don't have to worry about fumes or gas so if we wanted to we could pull the car into our space also and not worry about it and i just think that's the future also

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 50,026

Rating: 4.874115 out of 5

Keywords: converted garage, garage conversion, garage home, adu, transformer adu, transforming adu, transforming home, granny flat, modern granny flat, family compound, two generation home, swiss army home, murphy bed, unfolding table, pocket doors, led lighting, home inside house, rainwater capture, greywater, backyard garden, ramiro losada amor, backyard sheds, prismatica design, san diego, san diego adu

Id: d5q1w_wsO_c

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021