Letter from the Editor

The Second Most Passionate Room in the House

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

You’re born with the car gene, hundreds of motor passionate people have confirmed to me. Yet for the first hundred years of the car, we’ve hidden it. Not the passion, but the car itself. Auto garages have evolved from dirty backyard carriage houses into living rooms. The garage may be the last room in the house to get finished and decorated, but serious car enthusiasts are now leading the way to a new place to live with our vehicles. We’ll show you all of that here, on UltimateGarages.net.

The Germans have a concept, Ding-an-sich, which is loosely translated to mean that the contents of a place actually take on a presence and an identity all their own in that place, one different than if the contents are anywhere else. The stuff defines the place. The Ultimate Garages featured here are defined by the special cars and motorcycles inside them, in a way each individual car alone is not as interesting. Imagine a room with Albert Einstein, Napoleon, JFK, and Mao Tse-Tung sitting next to each other — an Ultimate Garage is the automotive equivalent of that fantasy.

A garage is not a museum. The vehicles contained within an Ultimate Garage are driven regularly, creating experiences for their owners. The vehicles are important not only for their histories, but for their current abilities on tours, rallies or vacant roads.

This trend to include the garage as human living quarters is illustrated in my book Ultimate Garages, originally an outgrowth of a magazine story in 1998. This website is a natural response to the thousands who read the book, which was published in 2003, and have asked for more. For every garage you see here, there are hundreds more that fill the role of ultimate refuge for our brother car nuts. We’re going to find these and show them to you. If you’re a car nut, you’ll find a home here. If you know a car nut, this site will help you understand how we work. And if you’re just a fan of nesting in general, we hope you’ll find inspiration here about how to make the largest room in the house fit to live well in.

- Phil Berg