Building With Style: Design for a Narrow Lot

Last month, we explored ways of stuffing a two-car garage into the front of a house on a narrow lot. In this article, I’ll look at what happens when you get rid of the attached garage, then focus on reinterpreting a popular narrow-lot home design (Figure 1). We saw that garages in front can overwhelm the scale of the house and even the street. Narrow driveways leading to garages at the rear, rear alleys serving backyard garages, or (in more urban settings) no garages at all, are a better answer. Putting the parking or garage at the back lets the house present itself to the street, per – haps with a porch. This creates an inviting and friendly