Luxury homeowners want luxury garages, and that makes perfect sense. You want to feel truly “home” the moment you actually arrive home. You want to arrive home to an organized, well-designed, fully-finished spaced—not a cluttered mess of haphazard sporting equipment and unfinished flooring.

Your light fixtures, shelving, and floors are carefully chosen in every other part of your house. Why would you ignore the very first and last “room” that you’ll see, when you arrive and depart from your home?

Plus, you live in Utah. You hike. You ski. You snow-mobile. You paddleboard. You kayak. You drive a truck…but you also drive a Tesla. You need a space that accommodates everything you use, in all the seasons of your life. And you need a space where you can get to your equipment easily, without having to spend more time retrieving a mountain bike from a jigsaw jumble than you actually spend riding. (Do you even feel like playing after it takes an hour to extract your gear from the back corner of your garage?)

What are the basics of luxury garage design?

First off, temperature control is a must. Controlling the temperature and humidity levels in your garage protects all of your other investments—your cars and expensive sporting equipment—while ensuring that your garage is a place you’re going to feel comfortable hanging out.

Luxury garages also have fully coated or polished flooring. The floors may be polished concrete, tiled, or even highly durable epoxy. You may want custom-created flooring; with a particular car or sports team logo. Your flooring needs to look great, but it also needs to be tougher than flooring in your house, to handle the weight and wear of vehicles and other heavy equipment.

You’ll want custom lighting, because lighting has a profound effect on mood and ambiance and how you experience a space. You’re going to spend time in your garage—prepping your seasonal equipment for storage, tackling a multitude of hobby projects, doing all the things that you do out there. You spend a lot on your vehicles, why diminish their beauty by subjecting them to unflattering light?

As for walling, you can opt for plaster, stucco, or stone. Basically, you get to choose from all the interior wall options that are on the table for the rest of your house. You may want trims or molded ceiling panels. Or you can go with slatwall panels, if space is limited, and you need to use your walls for storage.

You’ll definitely want built-ins in your custom garage. By this, we mean wall-length built-in cabinets and shelves, built in racks to store your carefully purchased gear; bikes, sleds, and skis, built-in storage for poles and paddles, etc. You may also want a specific closet just for landscaping or pool and beach equipment, so that stuff isn’t cluttering visible space during the off-season.

Store your sporting equipment effectively.

Your garage needs to have enough space to handle all your cars and trucks, as well as things like snowblowers, snowmobiles, mowers, boats, and whatever else you plan to fill it with.

We already mentioned built-in racks, but you should also keep in mind that kayaks and canoes need to be stored upside down, hanging or on cross-bars, to stave off warping. Your snowmobile needs to spend the summer on dollies, to prevent condensation damage.

And you’ll need a design that takes in to account the accessibility of your equipment, so that you can easily get to the pieces you use often.

There are some custom-designed garage extras you may want to consider.

If space is limited, you may want to consider installing a car lift. You may also think about making your garage multiple stories. That way, you can store vehicles on the lower level and have a workshop, fitness center, theater, game room, gift-wrapping room, or extra off-season storage on an upper level.

If you’re a hunter or you entertain a lot, you may want a full-sized refrigerator or deep freezer in your garage. And if you don’t have a central vacuum, you may want to consider including one in your custom-garage design. If you have a fully electric car, such as a Tesla, you’ll need a charging station.

Some couples prefer two garages, sort of like “his and hers” closets. This way, each person has their own space that they can personalize at will, for their own vehicles and toys. (Speaking of closets, having an open-air space to hang wet outwear in your garage is a great idea. Coats dry faster when they’re not shut in a closet, cutting down on unpleasant odors. And built-in shoe racks are a great way to store ski boots and even ice skates.)

Other amenities that may be useful or fun include a sink and counter work-area, an entertainment area with a bar and TV, or a mud-space with a floor sink, where you can clean your shoes before entering your house.

Luxury garages increase home value.

Having a clean, well-organized garage will increase your home enjoyment and encourage you to actually play outside, since it’s no longer a chore to locate and retrieve your gear. If you’re building a house that’s perfectly suited to your “mountain living” lifestyle, you do not want to discount the importance of your garage—the place that stores all of your favorite toys efficiently and securely. At Ledyard Homes, we’ve got plenty of custom-garage ideas and would love to share some of them with you.