The Legend of the “Invention Garage”

When Google started 25 years ago, it was in a disused garage. The company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, rented the Menlo Park, California, space from Susan Wojcicki, a friend who would go on to become the CEO of YouTube. The fledgling company paid $1,700 a month for the suburban garage, a sum that might seem a bit lofty for a no-frills box that typically houses dirty cars and old Christmas decorations, but it was actually a pretty fair price in Silicon Valley at the time, especially when you consider that Brin and Page had already raised $1 million from investors before they even moved in. They weren’t there for long, either, setting up shop just five months later in a start-up-filled office building in nearby Palo Alto.

And yet, in those five months, the myth of the Google Garage was established, something that the company has played into quite a bit since, even launching an interactive map of the original 1998 setup. It’s no wonder, given that the suburban start lands the company alongside other garage-founded mega conglomerates, including Apple, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Amazon, Mattel, Dyson, and Nest. If you buy into these companies’ creation stories, the garage symbolizes humble beginnings and a scrappy determination to push forward, no matter whether there was indoor plumbing or not.

While some of these "startup garage" stories have been blown a little out of proportion (Steve Wozniak says Apple really only warehoused gear in its famous garage, for instance) and countless other garage inventions have gone bust without making a single wave in the collective consciousness, that doesn’t change the fact that the garage’s myth endures. It’s not just a space for cars and oil stains and heaps of twisted up kiddo bikes. In the right hands, the myth says, even a cement floor and barely finished walls can make room for genius—provided you live in a temperate enough climate to withstand whatever highs and lows you might endure in an uninsulated space.

Even for those of us who can’t hope to craft an idea or a product that changes the world, the suburban garage holds possibility and promise. It can hold a second refrigerator where well-off families can warehouse their extra food and beverages. That kind of appliance puts financial stability on display with every open of that big, automatic garage door. It delivers the same kind of message as other garage mainstays, like a well-stocked workbench, a shiny vehicle, or even a nicely appointed man cave.

Garages offer promise: the promise of belongings to fill them, houses big enough to support them, and suburban utopias filled with cozy cul-de-sacs where semi-idle afternoons are spent futzing around with whatever project needs doing while a radio plays the baseball game in the background.

Garages are also beacons of confident design. When building the Robie House in 1908, Frank Lloyd Wright incorporated a three-car garage into the structure. It was one of the first times that had ever been done in a residential development, with previous structures housing cars away from the home, lest the residents be caught unaware if the newfangled contraptions spontaneously caught fire. Wright seemed to understand how the garage would become a crucial part of American households—though he reportedly hated the enclosed spaces, thinking they encouraged clutter. (The architect preferred open-but-covered "carports," a term he coined.)

And it’s partially because of companies like Google, Disney, and Apple and their famous founders that garages have become symbols of invention. Not much has changed in their design over the decades, save the introduction of the smart garage door opener, but the often half-finished, semi-industrial attached spaces remind us that anything is possible. The continued expansion of the garage-like space into "she sheds" and backyard ADUs has proved our desire for a canvas on which you can build whatever you want, whether that’s a software empire, a fledgling animation studio, or even just a quiet, semiprivate space to spend time alone.

Top Image of the Apple garage, garage at the childhood home of SteveJobs, by Beto Chagas/Shutterstock

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