Garage Entry Design

The flow of people between the garage and the front door calls for careful design. We wanted a single entry sequence for everyone, whether they arrived from the street, the driveway, or the garage. To support this, we chose to forego an opening from the garage to the house. Instead, the garage will exit into the main exterior entry space.

A happy side effect of this design is that it is more green. A garage opening into heated living space tends to cause heat loss and has a small detrimental affect on indoor air quality.

However, the original design for this sequence had a fatal flaw, at least in Seattle — it was not fully covered! As shown in the diagram above, the sequence of stairs required that you join the main path, and follow the main entry steps down to the front door. The roof (indicated by the grey dotted line in the above image) does not cover the entire entry sequence, leaving you vulnerable to the elements as you go down the steps.

We considered two solutions:

1. Extend the entry roof to cover the steps all the way to the top, covering the existing path from the garage to the entry.
2. Create a shortcut path heading west, directly from the garage landing to the main entry, and put a short roof along the side of the garage to cover this new path.

Adding a larger roof has the disadvantage that it would require a post on the south-east corner, and it would make the entry darker. The second option adds more complexity to an otherwise clean design — a second set of stairs, a possible railing, a different run/rise ratio of the treads. However, our architect avoided those problems and made choosing the second option an easy choice:

Instead of just using the flat eyebrow used over the entry, we wanted to make this new section of roof a feature. A few metal supports extruding from the garage will be sandwiched with wood and support a semi-translucent polycarbonate sheet. This will allow light to filter through, while keeping off the rain. It also allows us to avoid the awkward visual that would result from the difference in height between these two surfaces. We'll use the same design of roof over the lower door to the backyard to provide some more consistency.

Here's a similar roof design from another YS Development home:

This satisfied the design problem nicely, and was finished just in time for the garage framing changes that were required to support the newly-added roof.