A few years ago, when Baltimore architect Jeffrey Lees surveyed his client's property for an addition, he rejected building outward into the back yard. Like many homes in the Baltimore County town of Garrison, the 1940s Colonial had a well to supply water and it was situated right where the homeowners wanted to add a family room.
Mr. Lees decided the best way to remodel was to convert the two-car, attached garage and the hyphen -- the breezeway between it and the house -- into the additional living space. The challenge was to do all of this and end up with a design that looked like it was part of the original home, not a reworked garage.
"I wanted people to think that the room had always been there," says Mr. Lees, who specializes in residential work, including the restoration of historic homes. "I didn't want them to have any sense that the family room used to be a garage."
To accomplish this goal, he carved the garage into three areas -- a family room, a guest bedroom and a small bath. Then, drawing on inspiration from the Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis and the Mount Clare Mansion in Baltimore, he pushed the walls out by installing two large, custom-made bays -- polygonal spaces approximately 5 feet deep by 13 feet long -- in the back and the front of the building. These angled niches not only increased the size of the rooms, they flooded the spaces with light.
In the front, one bay replaced the garage doors and added a cozy sitting area to the guest bedroom. In the 12-by-22-foot family room, a padded window seat was built into the bay, creating the perfect spot for those wishing to sit and gaze at the wooded landscape. Additional light was funneled through a half-circular window tucked in the wall just above the center of the bay.
Fir trim and 8-foot-high wainscoting were added to give definition to the windows and the adjoining walls. The reddish-orange wood was also used for the tongue-and-groove cathedral ceiling, the beams and the truss that was installed to give extra support to the garage wall. In keeping with the rustic formality of the room design, oak flooring was installed over the original concrete floor.
The garage conversion was not the only work done on the house; the kitchen received a make-over. It was given custom-built cabinets, a U-shaped island and a ridge skylight. In all, more than 1,700 square feet of living space was added or reworked, not including the new two-car garage built to replace the old one.
But architect Lees has no trouble explaining what pleasures him most about the addition and renovation work: The original garage has metamorphosed into three handsome rooms that bear no resemblance to their humble predecessor.