What's got a liquid granite floor, stainless-steel cabinetry, a state-of-the-art wine fridge and skylights?
Here's a hint: You park your car in it.
The new fetish room for the design-conscious homeowner is not the kitchen or bathroom but that much maligned and oft-ignored oasis of function: the garage.
For eons, dads have spent Sunday afternoons communing with their tool benches, power washers and work tables, but now the days of the man of the house being relegated to an unheated, concrete shack decorated with a cheesecake calendar circa 1972 are long gone.
And for interior-design enthusiasts, the garage has become the final frontier in home organization and decoration. Joseph Botnick and Nissan Michael couldn't be happier.
Two years ago, the Toronto engineer and real-estate agent started Coach Haus ( http://www.coachhausgarage.com), a company devoted to garage design, enhancement and organization.
"The garage is the first thing you see when you leave the house in the morning and the first thing you see when you arrive home in the evening," Botnick explains. "You want a certain order and style."
Walking around their current project, an underground two-car garage beneath a Georgian revival mansion in Toronto's tony Forest Hill neighbourhood, hot garage style is in full effect. The 1,200-square-foot space boasts a pristine liquid granite floor (poured with Coach Haus's stain-resistant epoxy), aluminum diamond-tread base boards, soothing pot lighting (with decorative chandeliers to come), and original modern car photograph by Lynne Greenaway on the walls.
"I commissioned them specifically for my clients," Michael says, admiring the glossy shots of cherry-red sports cars. "This is no garage. It's a Garage-Mahal!"
Indeed, palatial garages are Coach Haus's specialty. In recent months, they have outfitted high-end carports with a wall-mounted Murphy-bed-style poker table, industrial wine-chilling tanks, patina copper doors and, in one case, a fully outfitted space for a car collector's 10 prized Ferraris.
"Everything was custom," Michael explains of the Ferrari job. "The lighting, the floors, the storage space. In the end, it looked just like a professional car show room."
Montreal-based Evolution Storage ( http://www.evolutionstorage.com) makes custom modular shelving for garages in vivid colours, including bright Ferrari red. At $1,000 a linear foot, the units are not cheap. Their slogan? "Evening dress will be required in your garage."
But even those lacking in luxury cars can find plenty of practical reasons to pimp the garage. It's not just about style, after all, but storage.
According to Nancy Drolet, a professional organizer affiliated with a GaragePower Inc. ( http://www.allinorder.ca), Cambridge, Ont., storage company, only 40 per cent of Canadians actually have room to park in their garages.
"For a lot of people, it's basically a dumping ground," she says. "We'll go into a home where people haven't been able to park their car in multiple years and create systems of organization that enable the client to get stuff off the floor and onto the walls and ceiling. We create a system that suits their needs."
GaragePower specializes in slat systems made of a composite material that can be mounted directly onto the stud walls and outfitted with anything from tool cabinets to special golf bag hooks.
Drolet is quick to point out that while garages are traditionally the place where men go to putter, when it comes to redesign, women like to get involved.
"Men are generally more interested in cabinetry, work benches and flooring," Drolet explains, "whereas women are more interested in the wall systems that ensure everything is neat and organized and in its place. When something is not being used, it goes back into the place it belongs. That's the idea."
At the recent Toronto Home Show, the most popular item at the GaragePower booth was the car lift, a mechanism that enables people to have multiple vehicles in single car garages. "I've even found clients who use the lift to store extra bikes, snowmobiles, ATVs, Sea-Doos, etc., and they don't have to pay for offsite storage," Drolet says.
And if, as professional organizers insist, the garage is one of the most used spaces in the house, why not fetishize it?
"You organize, you customize, you personalize and you accessorize," says Michele Savalox, a marketing manager and garage organizational expert for Gladiator GarageWorks, a Florida-based company specializing in custom garage systems.
"The garage does not have to be the eyesore of the house," she says, citing Gladiator's industrial steel tread-plate design (the gold standard in garage systems). "People want to shut their garage door as quickly as possible, but once it has a system like this, you can leave the door open and let your neighbours admire it."