Hat tip to Daniel (theotherone) who sent this in from Curbed, via Yahoo:
A Curbed SF reader sent us the above video of a magical garage door in the Upper Haight.
McMills Construction was working on an investment property on Oak Street, and they were scratching their heads over how to build a garage to enhance the tenant’s use of the building.
As we all know, it’s nearly impossible to consistently score a decent parking spot in the Upper Haight. The problem, you see, is that the city planning department had recently started enforcing its mandate to limit changes to the character of historic building’s front facades — especially when it came to converting bay windows into garage doors.
Corey McMills, who’s got a background in mechanical engineering, thought of an idea to covert the walls of the bay window into door panels that would fold into the garage space to allow cars to enter. The planning department accepted it. McMills Construction teamed up with Beausoleil Architects to help with the details. The result is brilliant.
Architectural Magic [Beausoleil Architects]
Jeezus, BFD.
Remember, we sent a man to the moon and got him back alive. I would consider THAT brilliant.
I consider this a problem solved in an ultra whacked out liberal-from-hell cesspool of a city that never met a landlord it didn’t want to f#ck over, and over.
In less than a week, a filthy street bum will piss all over it and claim it for his/her own space.
Clever, yes, brilliant, not so much.
I like it. I think it’s pretty cool.
Um… I guess they must have considered how much interior space you lose by having it open that way?
“Magical” has a pretty low bar nowadays. Show me a door that transformer-style folds in on itself having a zero interior footprint, and then I’ll be pretty close to calling it “cool”, but until then… meh.
I guess it’s easy to impress people in the bay area. Does it come from having such low expectations in life?
Chuck
I wonder how well that “no parking” sign works.
Wow, there are haters for everything! SF is awesome, and a better place to live than SD in nearly every way except cost and 20-30 days of weather.
As for the door, you definitely don’t want to side-swipe it going in. That would be one expensive error.
#1 3rd G – ..That’s assuming we actually sent a man to the moon…with computing/engineering power today vs then, why hasn’t ANYBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD done it since, much less the USA?
WRT why nobody else has gone to the moon, it’s because the moon, like Antarctica, was declared off-limits to sovereignty claims, private ownership and private development by international treaty. Nobody can ever make a profit by going to the moon except by being a contractor for an international space program such as the ISS.
I like the idea of a hidden garage door, even for a house that isn’t a historical property. I think they went overboard preserving the original stud structure, however. It should have been possible to design panels that are lighter and require less force and energy to move and still look authentic from the outside; Hollywood studios construct entire building facades that way.
Except for the window layout this looks like the garage door on my grandparents house that was put in in the 1920s. (Replaced in the 1960s). That one had 4 segments, one of which was an actual door as well. So its a case of back to the future here.