More in Store: Garages Grow

Forget the two-car garage. It’s practically passe.

Today’s toy-hungry elites are building five-, six- and even 20-car garages for their luxury playthings, from motor homes to jet skis to antique car collections.

They’re paving swaths of land equal to the size of most houses and tacking on car stalls like Lego blocks. Where space is scarce, they’re excavating huge stretches of earth for cavernous, underground parking lots filled with pricey classic cars.

Now, with the economy booming, the trend is trickling down to older neighborhoods where new homeowners are tearing down modest dwellings in favor of splashy mansions with garages to match. And some longtime residents don’t like what they’re seeing.

“I’m furious,” said Howard Ahlborn, whose neighbor built a 15-foot tall, nearly 770-square-foot garage for boat storage. The garage peers over Ahlborn’s fence, intruding on his backyard and degrading the home’s property value, he says. He even came close to paying a landscape architect $20,000 to conceal the building with trees.

“I’ll never forgive Villa Park for approving what I consider to be a monstrosity hanging over my backyard,” Ahlborn said.

He’s not alone.

Last year, new homes featuring two-car garages became the exception in Orange County. Most house designs--nearly 50%--had parking space for three cars or more and virtually none had one-car garages, according to the Meyers Group, a real estate information and consulting company.

“It’s pretty standard to have a three-car garage,” said Dean Wehrli, managing director of the Meyers Group. “On the higher end, you definitely need to offer at least” that.

A three-car garage, tastefully designed, can add value to a house, Wehrli said, but anything larger has little effect on a home’s price. “It may be a status symbol for certain buyers, but most don’t find it a huge consideration,” he said.

Still, some developers are undeterred--they’re building for upscale hobbyists with money to spend and playthings to store.

“People have more toys than they used to,” said developer Brian Kerr, who’s building two homes in Villa Park, each with a four-car garage. “When you’re buying a $1-million-plus house, you have lots of toys and you need a place to keep them.”

In the last 10 years, the number of floor plans submitted to cities that included three-car garages has doubled; designs for four- or more-car garages have more than quadrupled, according to the Meyers Group.

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Despite the climbing numbers, garages with four or more spaces remain pretty uncommon--only 47 of the 700 floor plans submitted last year to planning departments across Orange County.

Even larger garages--in the five-, six- and seven-car range--are a rarity, Wehrli said, the kind of buildings that stir neighborhood gossip and feed city lore.

Take, for instance, the Newport Beach man who built a 20-car subterranean garage for his car collection. Or the real estate mogul whose 15,000-square-foot garage in Coto de Caza harbors dozens of classic vehicles behind black velvet ropes. Or the Villa Park man who’s building a 2,000-square-foot, 20-foot tall monolith for his motor home, jet skis, antique car and truck.

For the owners, these flashy garages do more than just wow the neighbors. They provide security from both criminals and the elements.

“You don’t want to put your money outside,” reasoned Garrett Moscos, a Villa Park doctor whose fleet of exotic sports cars fills every space in his six-car garage.

Some cities, including Villa Park, are fighting sprawling garages in their older, unassuming communities.

Last month, the City Council passed an ordinance that requires residents to get a special permit for building garages to four or more car lengths or to a height above eight feet. Several months ago, Orange passed a similar law, forcing residents who want tall garages to send their plans to a committee for scrutiny.

“There’s room for these things, but we want to make sure they’re in keeping with the surroundings,” said Bob Bell, Villa Park councilman. “A house is not beautiful with all those garage stalls.”

But some say it’s just too easy to fill the archaic two-car--and even three-car--garages with the goodies of modern life.

When Bob Baeyens moved to Villa Park two years ago, his plan from the beginning was to knock down the old two-car garage and build a five-stall, 2,000-square-foot structure for his tools, family cars and the classic Corvette and Porsche that he’d kept in a Long Beach storage facility. The new garage is under construction.

For the Baeyens, the added room will be a welcome relief, Bob’s wife Susie said. “You get to the point where you pay to put your [recreational vehicle] in storage, you pay to put away the extra things that would normally go in a garage,” she said. “We’re in an age where people accumulate more things.”

But even with the extra space, Bob Baeyens admits, he’ll still have to keep his work truck parked on the street. There just won’t be enough room, he said, with all the cars, tools, and little luxuries. The new garage--easily the size of the neighborhood’s older homes--could get cramped in a few years.

“It’ll fill up,” he chuckled, “believe it or not.”