Outbuildings and Garages are often best designed as freestanding structures, or carefully designed additive forms, as integral outbuildings can dominate and detract from the appearance of a house, as well as reduce the amount of active frontage to the street.
Integral garages should not be encouraged unless they are part of a wide fronted house design influenced by distinctive 'outbuilding' house types. Where garages/integral garages are used as allocated parking spaces, perforate garage doors should be used to discourage the garage being used for storage and to keep the parking space available at all times.
Separate personnel doors allow access into and out of the building and improve access where cycles are stored within the garage. Garages can often be employed to link elements within the street scene (in conjunction with walls or hedges), or to help enclose properties and create privacy between gardens. Garages are ancillary to the house and should not become prominent features. Single garages, each serving a number of properties, should often be combined into one well designed structure to maximise the opportunity for creating attractive and usable external spaces, as well as enabling more attractive building compositions, oft in a mews type environment. Garages also need to be large enough to be used to park a car comfortably.
Key Considerations
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Garages to be aligned with, or set back from the building frontage.
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Single garages must have a minimum of 3m clear internal dimension to allow the door of a parked car to be opened once inside the garage.
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Garages with a pitched roof should reflect the roof pitch of the existing building and should not result in unresolved and unbalanced building elevations.
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Garages should complement the architectural style of the existing dwelling or streetscape and be built of similar materials to the existing property or use materials that reflect its use as an 'outbuilding' or subservient building.
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Houses with integral garages should seek to use design techniques to minimise the impact of the garage on the street frontage.
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Tandem garages will not count as providing space for 2 cars, as it is very unlikely that two cars will be parked in many of this type of garage.
