Setting down roots in the rural northwestern Illinois village of Shannon (population: 841) has enabled Daniel Payette and his wife, Jessica Merchant, not only to be closer to their families, but also to engage in a vibrant, varied lifestyle that’s rooted in sustainability and art.

A striking new garage by Chicago’s Converge Architecture, topped with enough solar panels to power the couple’s entire home, is just the latest in a series of building projects the couple have embraced at their .43-acre property and beyond.

After returning to his hometown to work as a regional planner following graduate school, Dan purchased a Shannon farmhouse in 2014 with an unusual setting: The 1956 structure occupies the site of a former church, and it’s surrounded by a cemetery on two sides. “The common joke is we hope we don’t hear from our neighbors, otherwise there’s an issue,” Dan says with a laugh.

When he married Jessica and she moved in, they expanded the 900-square-foot home by 200 square feet. They removed a wall between the kitchen and living room, exposed and expanded a pattern of glass blocks in the kitchen, and added locally milled ash wood floors. But that was just the start.

After expanding their house without help from an architect, the couple hired Converge to reconsider what a garage could be: not just a utilitarian container for their cars, but a piece of architecture in its own right.

“We couldn’t quite figure out how to get it integrated with the house,” Dan recalls. “We were thinking about doing perhaps a little bit more: a combined garage and small expansion to the house. But eventually, we decided that would have the potential to dwarf the house. I guess the planning part of me thinks houses are for people, and cars are important, but not necessarily something that you want to emphasize too much. But it’s also something you have to look at every day.”

While a few local architects balked at designing Dan and Jessica’s garage, Converge were up to the task—after all, they had already won acclaim for an even smaller project: a 120-square-foot condo remodel in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Besides, “Dan and Jessica were so easy to talk to, and they really understood design,” says Converge principal Annabell Ren. By coincidence, Ren’s husband and Converge’s managing principal, Steven Karvelius, grew up in the small town of Morrison, Illinois, just 35 miles from Shannon.

Once Dan and Jessica decided against an attached garage, they also had a stylistic decision to make. “You can either match really well, or you can contrast really well, and we went with contrast,” Dan explains.

The couple have planted dozens of trees and shrubs on their property (including black cherry, sweetbay magnolia, honey locust, and Lombardy poplars), and they fretted about how a garage would change their view of this natural setting. “If we were going to lose that, we felt like we’d better be looking at something that’s just as interesting as what we lost,” Jessica explains. “So I think‚ the aesthetics of the garage were also quite important to us.”

The couple had also been influenced by their experience creating Jessica’s art studio, on the other side of Shannon, which was renovated from a former auto body shop. Its exterior wood cladding and glass-paneled garage door inspired similar design choices.

Inside, the new garage’s concrete floors give way to plywood walls festooned with an array of drawers and cabinetry on one side. On the other, there’s a wall-mounted series of pegboards with movable hooks for storing tools. Nearby is an arch-shaped doorway, above which the couple mounted the wood offcut created when the arch was made.

“You don’t really need those things for a garage,” Dan says, “but we thought, What can we do with some of the discarded materials to make it look interesting? We really wanted the garage to be more than just a car-hole.”

To the left of the entry, the garage’s roof extends to create what Ren calls a “three-season room—which is basically a covered patio with benches and lighting.”

The roof cantilevers over this plywood-walled gathering space, which is capped on two sides by screens of vertical wood panels. At the top, where the roof extends, Jessica painted a custom mural by tracing shadows cast by a mature walnut tree nearby.

“I went out every morning for a week, for as much time as I could get with the shadows on there before the sun was too high,” Jessica recalls. “I’d kind of chase the shadows as they went across and catch what I could, so it’s a little record in time of what it looked like during a specific week.”

“Besides being pretty cool, it also solved the problem,” Dan says with a smirk, “which was we ran out of cladding to do that section.”

The garage is wrapped with Arbor Wood, a thermally modified cladding made of domestic and sustainably sourced white ash. It undergoes a chemical-free process that uses heat and steam to increase the material’s durability and performance.

Beside the garage’s covered patio, the ground is paved with reclaimed brick pavers the couple sourced from a demolished garage in nearby Iowa. Each brick is stamped with an emblem from the factory where it was made. “We have never seen any quite like them,” Jessica says. “We didn’t save any money over getting new ones, but I think they’re worth the little investment to have something that unique.”

Atop the garage is a 7.6-kilowatt solar array, large enough to power the entire house—sort of. The project inspired the couple to purchase an electric vehicle, which now means that “we may need to add a few panels, to even it out,” Dan explains, noting that ground-mounted panels can easily be added to augment the rooftop array.

The weight of the panels also had to be given consideration during the design process. “Because we didn’t have a structural engineer, right-sizing the trusses and the structure took a lot of back and forth between the client, contractor, the wood shops, and us,” Ren explains.

The garage, the renovated house, and the art studio aren’t the only projects Dan and Jessica have been involved with. Dan and his father are working to save and restore the town’s historic brick water tower, dating to the late 1800s, which his father purchased. They hope that the tower could someday hold an observation deck.

“It would be really great if we could just restore it and allow other people to view Shannon from another perspective,” Dan says, “and maybe think to themselves, ‘I can appreciate my town in a different way.’”

“We built off other people doing projects, and one of our hopes is for other people to say, ‘I can do something like that, too,’” Dan adds, drawing from his career as a planner as well as his perspective as a homeowner. “Maybe it doesn’t look like ours, because they have entirely different tastes, but, they’ve made a decision to improve something that matters to them, or to the community.”

Related Reading:

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They Built Twin Backyard Offices for $51K—No Permit Required

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Converge Architecture / @converge_architecture

Builder: Chris Sturtz

Landscaping: Baber Service Company

Solar Panels : Stateline Solar

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It Doesn’t Look Like an Average Garage—and It Helps Power Their Home