3 Interior Designers Transform The Same Empty Garage | Space Savers | Architectural Digest

These three interior designers have been asked to transform this empty garage into a luxurious guest suite. They have free reign to design it in any way they please. I'm Joy and my design style is comfortable, relaxed, and classic. I'm Darren Jett and my design approach is narrative driven, bold, and daring. I'm Naz and my design style is sometimes minimalist, zen, and very material first. No clients, no budget, just blank space. My first impressions of this garage is that it should be torn down, but we are not going to do that. This garage door is sad. This would be the clear reminder, no matter what you did, no matter how many flowers and bouquets you put in this room for your guests, they will know with this door and this mechanism, I'm sleeping in somebody's garage. My first impressions of this garage is that it's a pretty big space and it also has some really good bones. It's pretty raw, so I think we can have a lot of fun with it. We are going to breathe new breath into this structure and make it a lovely residence for grandma. My vision for the space was that it's a real mother-in-law space, but a new age grandma, think Tina Turner, who just left the Beyonce concert, who's still feeling cozy and wants to kind of shake it up and, you know, let her family know that grandma's still pumping, grandma's still whipping it. For me, a luxury is having something you yourself can use it at all times, if you so choose. I'm starting to approach this thinking about the terminology of a body shop. I would like for this to also be a gym. How can we incorporate a guest room, a gym, and a garage all in one? As soon as I saw this garage, I was like, I want to do Zen-dustrial, which is Zen and industrial mixed together. Industrial because it's a garage and Zen because there's gorgeous trees outside. I want to bring some of that beautiful peacefulness into this garage. So this floor is just a poured concrete floor. You can see it's a little worse for wear. We can do a lot better. What we want to do in this space is to think about indoor-outdoor at all times. At the end of the day, this is a garage. It has to be a space that can accept an oil spill. The car can pull in and it's not going to damage the floor. So what I want to do is have the floor basically just be the driveway. In this case, the driveway comes into the space. And instead of it just being a plain concrete, let's do something a little bit cooler. Let's have the concrete poured and then have stones inside of it that just give a little bit of texture. I really want to lean into the idea of a masculine focused space. So the idea of having rocks embedded into the flooring, that is really our first step in the process. I personally love an epoxy floor. First of all, it's very doable. And second of all, you can actually paint with epoxy. You can pour it out and almost like resin, you can rake it around and make swirly marbleized patterns. So I want to do something like that here, but it's zen. And so you would actually rake two different colors of epoxy, a lighter beige and a darker gray. And we would rake that into the shape of a zen garden. Grandma is this funky diva. Her best grandchild is her new Bugatti. And she wants it on full display at all times. And we're going to paint the concrete. It's not the most novel idea in the world, but what is, is we're going to dig deep. So the car will be below a floor that is inset with this transparent material and look down at her Bugatti. So it's going to look like it's encased in a picture frame. We're not going to just put this thing outside. This is an investment, an art piece that is born to be loved. I actually want to keep the idea of the framing in the space. I don't really want to be rebuilding this thing at all. I'm actually going to essentially just cover two of the stud areas here with a darkened wood. And then adjacent to that, you would have the red glass. What I would like to do is to also have the ability to open up those panels so that you could get some breeze in and just make a really comfortable environment. The overall material palette of this room really is inspired by Toshima Art Museum in Japan. They have the sort of darkened black wood with glass that is tinted red. What's really cool about that is you can see outside, but everything turns into a sort of black shadow in a way. The walls are just going to receive an encaustic Venetian finish, which is a very troweled hand with wax, which also creates depth within the wall finish. And then we're going to create this beautiful bronze inset framework with dividers separating the private space from the public space. While there is nothing wrong with the door over here, I want to move it over to where this window is and replace this window with like a glass door. The only other thing I'm going to do is I want to make this window a teeny bit bigger. You're going to move things around architecturally. This is the time to do it when your space is just a shell. Then once I've moved this over, I'm going to actually insulate the walls. Going back to the zen thing, I love shoji screens. I have a vision of us being able to use shoji screens to actually hide this giant electrical panel, to hide the window, to do a lot of things. And I would use kind of an oak that's similar to this, which is very light and beautiful, very Americana because I like oak, rather than using like a hinoki cypress cedar, which is more endemic to Japan. This is, I would say, like the hinoki of America. So we're going to do white oak all over the place for the frames. I really love the existing beams, and I wanted them to remain because I think they're a nice little architectural application. What a lovely opportunity to have a vaulted ceiling. Why spend extra money when you don't have to? So just adding a really rich, deep, dark stain to them, I think is a nice contrast to the Venetian walls. The space itself is very cool from a geometric perspective. Cathedral ceiling, the sort of A-frame that lives on top of the rectangle. So what I would like to do is to just embrace that. Why don't we just carry that same materiality up from the walls onto the ceilings? So wherever you have a wood wall will be a wood ceiling, and wherever you have the red glass wall will be a red glass ceiling. I love these rafters. This is a beautiful thing if you want them, but I kind of love the idea of having all the structure for the garage roof actually go outside. So you don't need rafters like this. We're going to keep the center beam because that's beautiful. I'm going to hold the ceiling up. And then I want to put skylights in. I want there to be an opportunity for you to cover all of the garage windows and doors up in order to have privacy. You still might want like natural light to flow in. So let's take the shoji screens up onto the vaulted ceiling of the garage and then have skylights overhead. Like how darling. So now let's address the garage door in the room. I was going to say the elephant, but it's a garage door. I really don't like this one. If we're using this as a living space, a standard garage door is not going to cut it. Again, the goal was really to create a residential feel to this garage. First thing we got to do is we got to get rid of this hideous standard garage door. The original door location in this garage was actually dead center of the space, but in effort for the parking garage to be approached the way I needed it to be, I relocated the doors from the front of the garage to the side of the garage. So a nice way to create that residential feel is to work with residential sort of style doors, but make them fabulous, you know, get a nice finish to them and eliminate any of that tinny aluminum feel. We're going to make it glass and steel because that makes it much lighter and more beautiful. There's this architect, Olson Kundig. They make the most spectacular garage door walls, very refined industrial inspiration for a lot of what's going on here, where they'll have like a giant wheel and then a tiny wheel where you turn the tiny wheel and that moves the door open. Obviously, I'll also have a button where you can press it and it automatically opens because who wants to sit there and you're like, oh my God, like I'm still outside of my car, like turning my wheel. But now let's address that I just put a glass garage door in a place that's supposed to also be a private guest area, right? Fritted glass, that is my answer. It's basically electrified glass where it's clear until you press a switch and then it turns frosted for privacy. It's such a brilliant invention and that film is going to make all the difference in allowing guests as well as your own self to see out into the beautiful trees in this neighborhood or have the privacy that you need when you're staying. First of all, imagine this wall as being all mirror. That would be great to make this sort of darker space feel a bit larger and also if it's a gym, you want to have a mirror across from you while you're working out. But what I would like to do is to have one section of that mirror be stationary as a wall and the other part be a movable door. It's also mirror, but it opens up to the left and that's whenever you would have your car coming in and you have a mirrored sliding garage door. So now let's actually like put some function in here. We need a little kitchenette. I think that's really important. Even if you go into the main house for like the shower and the toilet, you always want to have a sink. So the cabinetry itself is going to be wood, the same oak, but a touch lighter than the rest of the oak on the Shoji screen frames. And then for the countertop, I am envisioning Lemurian granite. It's mostly because I love holograms and I love like rainbow. Lemurian granite almost looks like Labradorite if you're a rock hound. And basically it's got these iridescent crystal chunks, but otherwise is mostly like a dark gray neutral. I am seeing like a slab counter that becomes the sink as well. And then we'll have a side splash and a back splash to protect the Shoji screens from getting wet. Of course, we have to be practical. And then the whole thing flows into a giant folder. Ah! So I love the idea. I don't know if folks know this. You know, you can go to a slab yard and special order boulders. I'm envisioning someone just really loving rocks, as do I. And then we're going to have like a little mini fridge. At the very, very front of the space, we have two wonderful vintage lounge day beds from Jean Prouvé. We have some additional side tables from Cedric Hartman, which have a lovely sleigh leg base to them, which are a bronze finish. The bed design is very intentional. It's based on a reference from the 1970s stainless steel bed frame with leather bedding on top of it. And it's actually held up by four pulleys on the corners with eight wires hanging from them. These are cables that can go around the pulley and it can be lifted up from the ground whenever you want to have a car inside of the garage. So for this guest bedroom purpose, I would really like for the bed to not just be a bed. I think that if we can pull up a really cool chair next to it, have a sort of coffee table moment, the bed can also be like a day bed or like a sofa where it's not just a bed hanging out in the middle of space. It's actually a really cool thing to sit on and use and other things. This particular lounge chair is actually by Roger Tallon. It's a sort of egg crate foam material with a nice stainless steel base. It's a beautiful tension between the stainless steel and the reclaimed wood and the red glass. And then we'll have a glass table next to that to really emphasize the materiality of the floor. I always like to use round dining tables because I detest any sense of hierarchy at the dining table. I want everybody to be on even keel. We have a beautiful wood dining table from Gallery Studio. The rattan dining chairs are from Our House and I just really love this sort of sculptural edge profile to them. And I thought the finish goes really, really well with the vaulted stain on the ceiling. When you are able to pull a palette together of materials that have a sense of commonality and reference, it makes things feel like they belong together. The reason I want to move the door all the way to the other wall is because all of the rest of the function that gets built in is on this wall next to the kitchenette. I want to do as little built in on the other side of the garage to allow for maximum square footage. So all of the function lives only on one walls. We're going to have the Murphy bed, of course, because you can't just have the bed living out there. And that is going to be in all wood. Next to it, we'll have like storage and a little desk because it's still a garage. You still have to have somewhere for you to put all your extra Windex and all your extra paper towels and your toilet paper. Like somewhere you need storage still. So we're going to have storage and then the little desk area is for guests and that'll have the same countertop as the kitchenette. The sleigh bed is from Dimitri and Company and it's got that sort of swoopy, sensual edge detail to it of the framework. The side tables are a combination of wood and plexiglass. So they feel very, very light and almost disappear against the bed. I really like the idea of there being real furniture in here, but all generally small enough or on wheels that you can move it out of the way when you're parking your car here. Most of the time, this garage is going to be a garage for a car. I don't want the furniture to be super precious, but I still want it to be chic and amazing. I'm really in love with the Ekstrom sofa. They have a version that is on casters and I love the idea that the biggest piece of furniture, you're just going to like roll it out and I'm going to upholster the cushions in this beautiful indoor-outdoor fabric. It's designed by Kelly Wurstler for Lee Jofa. It's actually really soft and squishy if you could feel it. It's almost got kind of like a happy terrycloth vibe and I love the indigo colors. So we have Vonnegut Craft, a beautiful furniture maker. I'm going to do their mesa coffee table and then they also have this little stool that kind of almost has like a torii gate sort of swoopy seat on it. And then I recently found this adorable, beautiful, spectacularly weirdo chair by Studio Sam Klemek. I just love everything about it and it's actually upholstered just like this. Like I didn't custom change the upholstery or anything. I actually really like it as is. It feels very like Japanese inspired and I love the idea of doing like indigos and bricky reds to sort of warm up an otherwise really neutral space. I think in general, the lighting is going to mostly be coming from the windows. But you know, you're also going to be using the space at nighttime too if it is a guest room, right? What I would like to do is wherever you have the wooden walls to have integrated lighting on the floor. That would wash up the wall and just make the room feel brighter while also still casting a very strong cone of light and being a bit dramatic. You also want to have lighting from the ceiling as well. So just having very simple spotlights on the bottom of each beam on the left and right side will help you out there. Let's talk overhead first. I've removed all of the structure in the ceiling and now we have this like gaping vaulted ceiling. I did that because I want to have a giant light fixture. Just because it's a garage doesn't mean that you can't have a luxury. I'm really in love with Jeff Zimmerman's pieces who makes basically illuminated sculptures. Fancy artistic word for lights. And there's this one which is kind of like swoopy and looks like a tree branch that has blossoms coming off of it. It's giving that organic nature tone to the space that otherwise is very rectilinear. So I love the idea of one of those in kind of a bronze dark black finish coming out of this black painted beam and filling the room with a beautiful soft glowy light. We have a recess with very warm lighting and also storage units for all of her little bits and such. And it feels like a gallery space when she's sitting there reclining on the Jean Prouvé day beds or just entertaining. And as we're moving to the dining area there's this really delicate sort of leaf-like verdigris chandelier from Cox London which is really just very light, not heavy in the space. And it kind of brings the greenery in without having to maintain plants because she's traveling all the time. So it sort of has a nice naturalistic vibe to that space. So we've just got little, you know, lights from Lulu in Georgia because, you know, you got to read something and grandma's got to lay there and figure out the destination for her next trips. Just next to the window you still need light over the countertop. I just want everything to kind of be vibey, right? So I want to use this ochre piece. It's actually already part wood and then there's this beautiful giant glass lens on it where an LED shines all the way through the glass. And then the bottom of the glass becomes what lights up. It's kind of wild. It looks magical. At the bed, there are these amazing sconces designed by Sarah Schoenberger. And I just think they're so ridiculous. They go like this and they're just, they're mostly just really thin. I've never seen a hardwire light that has such a slim profile. So it's perfect for us to put along the frames of the Murphy bed. So the lights do stick out because they're sitting vertically perpendicular to the rest of the Murphy bed frame. So we're going to put them on hinges and then you could fold them in against the Murphy bed when it wasn't in use. So now let's talk about plants. This is still a zen garden inspired space. So I really love bonsai trees in here. If you look up, are bonsai trees indoor or outdoor plants? Yes. I am equally as confused. It's yes and yes. So I love the idea of having a really big, tall Japanese black pine. It's my favorite bonsai plant and they can grow in the United States. I'm going to have one over here that kind of further disguises this whole shoji screen covering up the electrical panel situation. And that one is on casters. When this is a garage garage, that tree lives outside principally. So it gets fresh air, it gets precipitation, it gets sunshine, and it continues to grow into a large bonsai. And then it comes inside when you have guests. So it's like a little lovely organic moment. And then over on the giant boulder, we're going to have more of a traditional little bonsai. And that one lives in a pot that you can carry around. So this one is the indoor plant, but I did want to make that window larger so that you can have plenty of light shining down onto that little baby bonsai. In this space, I want to keep the decorative elements to a minimum. Of course, we're going to have a plant. I want to have something that's a bit more sculptural. So in this case, having more of a cactus. And really, I want to let the architecture speak for itself. And I want to let the user also take precedence. I want the car to take precedence when it's inside of here. I don't want to have too many things going on. I want it to be very architectural. And simple at the end of the day. And then we've got some beautiful contemporary artwork by Michael Dawkins. And the decorative mirror directly above is from perigold. And it's like so inexpensive. And the architecture in this room really just kind of riffs off one another. And it just creates a nice balance within the space. The warm gallery artistic sort of vibe for today's grandmas was nailed here. It's an upbeat space, artistic space, comfortable space. Grandma clearly loves to entertain. She's paying homage to her Bugatti that she worked her tail off for and wants everybody to see it. So cue the music. I think this room is really sick. I think that as a guest room, it's kind of a gag. I think it's actually very cool. I don't think there's anything to shy away from. There's something cool about showcasing your life to people. So if your in-laws are staying here, they know who you are and they're going to love it. They love you and you're welcoming them into your home. So let them sleep on a leather bed, suspended from the ceiling, and they're going to remember it forever. I am so happy with the end result. I would be really proud personally to have guests in a space like this, especially because it's so indoor-outdoor. Oh! Nelly! Okay, S&M Fantasia. Sexto! Wow! It's a sexto! Look at her! This is amazing. I love, I love all of this. Red, of course. I'm absolutely fond of everything. Wait, but it's also a gym though, right? It's a gym, yeah. I love! Wait, that's funny. That's a very sex scene room. I was thinking like, you know, the ultimate luxury is to have something that you can use sort of all the time. Yeah, 100%. It's not just a guest room. So I also had this thought of like a body shop. Oh, cool. What kind of body shop? That's amazing. But your bed goes up, up this way. So mine folds up. It's just a murphy bed. And your garage door is the glass door right there. It's this giant glass door. And then it has glass door switch. You know, the thing where then all of a sudden the window glass... Fritted glass for privacy. Thank you. That's what it's called. I am meeting Joy all the time to remember my words. Joy, yours is really giving like luxury bedroom too. It's so beautiful. It does not even look like a garage. Dance party at seven. Yeah. Because she's a little older. So it needs to start a little earlier. But there's definitely dance. Mine goes all night. With your workout party. Exactly.