Humble garage the last word in luxury

Domestic garages tend to store everything except cars but they are very useful when too much snow falls

WHATEVER HAPPENED the domestic garage? There used to be a modest roofed building attached to most houses in the country, with clean, breeze-block walls. Now we have to dig our cars out of the snow.

Last week in the cities a small number of privileged apartment dwellers were whistling as they floated down to their underground car parks. They could drive in their slippers, whilst counting their lucky stars.

Communal parking used to be common practise in the housing developments of the first half of the 20th century.

Then individualism kicked in and people built their own garages, frequently sacrificing a lot of their garden to do so.

From my extensive research, this trend seems to have started in about 1950. I seem to remember people building their own garages. I also seem to remember them using asbestos to build them.

But most of us in the cities and inner suburbs live in terraces, or semi-detached residences, where building your own garage is not an option, and so we have grown to live with what the auctioneers – back in the days when this country had auctioneers – used to call on-street parking.

Off-street parking used to be a bit of a selling point back in the days when houses in this country had selling points. Anyway, last week we on-street types were having to dig our cars out as they sat snowed into position outside our houses. It was quite good fun as long as you succeeded. Actually it was quite good fun anyway, if you didn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry.

Even the newly built houses in the countryside and near country towns appear to be pretty short of garages. About 10 years ago it seemed that every newly built house standing on its own site in a rural area had a freestanding garage built as an exact replica of the main house, like the house and kennel of a cartoon human and his happy dog.

This arrangement demonstrated the car’s status as the second most treasured possession, and that it had its own house, as a beloved pet. There was something Japanese about these matching buildings, with their identical roofs. But now the domestic garage seems to have vanished as a concept, presumably because cars became more robust and more able to withstand the weather.

And also because each house now has at least two cars, so that providing garage space for them all would take up a lot of space, and providing garage space for just one of them would cause a lot of family fights. I bet the functioning garages now left contain the least-used car in the household.

The shadowy garages of our childhood, with their flower pots, knots of punctured hose, broken bicycles and the occasional hamster inside, and a brass handled tap outside, don’t exist anymore. If they are not demolished then they have been converted into dens, studies or an additional bedroom.

And if the garages are not converted they have been overcome and colonised by a jumble of furniture and other objects which you simply have to store. For example, the Christmas decorations, and the belongings of your stupid adult children who are trying to live the minimalist dream, the urban chic dream and the Gustavian floorboard dream all at the same time. I would call this a foolish waste of a garage if I had not recently begged to be granted some space in exactly this sort of storage facility.

Garages have effectively become sheds, and some have the domestic boiler located there, and an indoor washing line, so that you have your own sort of boiler room. In this climate, so useful.

In short garages, where they exist, store everything except cars. Those of us without garages have nowhere to put things when we need to store them on an informal, or short-term, basis. This causes more problems than you might think.

For example, last week the main problem for those of us without garages was not that we had to dig our cars out from the kerb, but that the Christmas dinner was buried all over the garden. Four litres of tomato soup here, a tub of coffee ice cream there.

Every year at Christmas cooks pray for more fridge space, and then look what happened: the whole country became a fridge and you had to work hard to bring food back up to freezing temperature. But first you had to find it. With a garage, preferably a garage accessible off the kitchen, you wouldn’t have been dashing through the snow with a damn saucepan.

But never mind, things change. I know a man who cooked a turkey over 18 hours at 75 degrees. The turkey weighed 15 pounds plus stuffing, and he put it on at 180 degrees at first, to kill the bacteria. It’s different.

Some people call these turkey and garage-related questions lifestyle issues but actually they are daily life – so close that change is hardly noticed. The imperceptible demise of the domestic garage could still reverse, as our winters are predicted to be getting this cold for at least some part of each coming year.

I rather hope they do come back. Not that I would keep my car in a garage, obviously. Happy New Year.