A Builder's Garage

This garage started as a way to keep a collector's cars at home.

by Phil Berg

Peter McCoy is one of those collectors who doesn’t want his cars farther than 200 feet from his bedroom: “It is of no interest to me to have a car stored offsite. My involvement is more instantaneous. I want to get up in the morning and say ‘I want to take the blue Porsche.’ Driving these cars is a spontaneous thing, and if you store them offsite, you say ‘I’ve got to get in the car and I have to go down there and get a car.’ Then you have to remember to get your sunglasses and anything else you need when you’re driving, and you have to ask ‘Did I remember to bring my hat?’”

McCoy owns a construction company in California, “so for me it’s maybe a little easier than what some of the other guys want to do. I wouldn’t normally install this kind of wood, but I was tearing down a house and it was old paneling in that house and I just used it here.”

McCoy lived in the same house more than 40 years. “There was a small garage that was more accommodating to storing unused household products than it was to storing cars. But I didn’t like leaving cars out, so when the opportunity presented itself for me to redesign parts of the house, I decided I would have a lot of storage space and a lot of garage space. Had I known when I built the garage where I was going with the cars I wanted to get, I may have done some things differently. I may have made it deeper; I may have put a different roll top garage door on it. I would have framed the roofing differently to make it easier to put a lift system in. I can do some of that now, it’s just more of a pain that I didn’t plan ahead for an eventuality that may or may not come.”

He built the garage from the ground up: “We had an architect for it. The evolution of the garage was that the kids were at home and they were both driving cars in high school and I just didn’t like cars in the driveway. So we designed the four-car garage really as a family garage.” he recalls McCoy.