Garage studios
Issue 274: A study of the garage as a place where ideas take shape
There’s a particular feeling that happens when you step into a garage. The temperature shifts a little. The sounds of the house fall away. The light comes from a different angle. It’s a threshold more than a room—close enough to daily life to be convenient, far enough away to feel like something else entirely.
I started setting up a small studio in my garage for drawing and research, and I found myself entering that threshold more often than I expected. Not for long sessions—sometimes just a few minutes at a time. The space invited a different pace. A garage doesn’t ask to be polished or presentable. It asks only that you do the work that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
This same quality is what made garages fertile ground for early computing and electronics. They created a subtle but important separation, a small resistance that signaled: you are now in a place meant for making.
The birth of Silicon Valley in garages
Before there were venture firms, research campuses, or corporate innovation labs, there were garages. The early formation of Silicon Valley didn’t happen in boardrooms; it happened in the unused square footage attached to people’s homes. These spaces weren’t chosen for romance. They were chosen because they were the only rooms available that could tolerate noise, mess, and improvisation.
The HP Garage on Addison Avenue—a rented house where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built audio oscillators—set the template. A garage was cheap, private, and carried no expectations. You didn’t need credentials to enter. You just needed to be willing to tinker.
Decades later, the pattern repeated. Jobs and Wozniak assembling Apple I boards in Los Altos. Page and Brin rented Susan Wojcicki’s garage while refining the first version of Google. Jeff Bezos used his garage as Amazon’s initial fulfillment line, packing books on a door balanced on two sawhorses. Even earlier examples—Disney’s first animation tests in a family garage, Mattel’s earliest manufacturing experiments—show that the garage predates the startup era. It has always been a shelter for early, uncertain work.
The garage became the cultural shorthand for invention not because the spaces were elegant, but because they were permissive. A garage didn’t judge the ambition or absurdity of an idea. It simply provided a room where the consequences of trying something were minimal.
Separation without distance
One of the reasons the garage endures as a creative ideal is its proximity. You don’t have to commute or pack a bag. You step through a door—sometimes just a few feet—and enter a different mode of work.
There’s that saying in photography: “The best camera is the one you have with you.” The same is true for studios. The best creative space is the one close enough that you actually use it. A garage creates a threshold between the everyday and the exploratory without requiring a significant transition. It’s close enough to enter casually but separate enough to shift your mindset.
This small degree of separation matters. The main rooms of a house are coded for domestic life. A home office is increasingly coded for screens, calendars, and synchronous obligations. But the garage is coded for focus. It’s a room where the usual expectations of productivity don’t apply. You aren’t in meetings. You aren’t performing. You’re experimenting.
Because the friction to enter is so low, the garage invites short, unstructured sessions—five minutes to sketch something, ten minutes to try an idea, an hour late at night when everything else is quiet. Creative work often benefits from this kind of casual return. You don’t have to wind yourself up to begin. You simply walk into the room that signals a different way of working.
A room for tools
Garages are not optimized for capability, not comfort—concrete floors, exposed studs, improvised shelves. Everything about the environment says: this is a workplace that might get messy.
That intention is freeing. When you don’t need to protect the aesthetic of a room, you can focus on the tools themselves. A garage can hold physical materials—wood, clamps, inks, sketchbooks—but also the tools of contemporary craft: scanners, tripods, lighting setups, reference books, boards for pinning sketches. Tools increase the range of possible ideas. When they are visible and reachable, they invite use.
What makes a garage feel different from a home office is that it celebrates the physicality of process. You can leave a drawing half-finished on a table. You can pin references to a wall and let them stay there for weeks. The room becomes a living record of what you are exploring. It’s not designed to be tidy; it’s designed to support an evolving body of work.
In the mid-2000s, Microsoft launched The Garage as an internal innovation program. It wasn’t one space but a network of maker-style labs across company campuses: Redmond, Vancouver, Herzliya, Beijing, Hyderabad, and others. The name was intentional. It linked Microsoft’s future-facing R&D culture back to the earliest Silicon Valley origin stories.
The Garage served a few purposes:
An institutional permission slip: Employees could prototype ideas outside normal product roadmaps. The program encouraged hacks, side projects, and experiments without worrying about OKRs, resourcing, or approvals. It wasn’t about outcomes; it was about energy.
A physical space for tools: The labs included 3D printers, electronics benches, soldering gear, CNC machines, laser cutters, and later, VR/AR rigs. This was the corporate translation of the classic “room for tools” garage ethos — but at enterprise scale.
A storytelling mechanism: By naming it The Garage, Microsoft was deliberately reconnecting with the scrappy roots of computing culture. It’s a way for a large company to say: innovation doesn’t only happen in polished conference rooms. It happens where experimentation feels safe.
Output: The Garage produced several internal and public projects over time, including early Kinect hacks, Office add-ins, Windows utilities, and later mobile apps. Most weren’t products; they were prototypes designed to stretch teams’ abilities and cross-pollinate skills.
Building my own garage studio
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been converting my own garage into a studio—a space for analog drawing, reading, and research. I didn’t want another room filled with screens. I wanted a place where the work could be slower and more tactile.
This is my sacred creativity space, and you’ll never see me take a Zoom meeting from here. I’ve been setting up a drawing table, testing lighting, pinning sketches to the wall, and organizing materials into stations. There’s a shelf for books I want within arm’s reach. A place to photograph sketches. A place to leave things out so I can return to them without losing momentum.
What surprised me is how different the work feels when I step into this space. The garage widens the field of attention. It reminds me that ideas often form through the hands before they form in language. It’s becoming a room for thinking in materials rather than abstractions.
Alternative spaces to a garage
A garage is a useful metaphor, but the qualities it offers—privacy, separation, tools, a sense of permission—can be recreated in other ways. Not everyone has access to a dedicated room, but anyone can build a space that functions like a garage.
A walk-in closet with a desk, lamp, and materials can become a micro-studio. A balcony or patio can serve as a quiet corner for reading and sketching. A rolling cart filled with tools can transform any room into a temporary workspace. Even a single table in the corner of a living room, reserved only for analog work, can create a meaningful boundary.
If space is tight, time itself can serve as a studio. Early mornings or late evenings can offer the separation that a physical room might not. Libraries, maker spaces, and shared studios can become public versions of the garage—places where the expectations of everyday life don’t follow you in.
The important part is not the square footage. It’s the shift in posture. A garage studio is any environment where you step into a different mode: slower, more tactile, more exploratory. A place where tools are close, distractions are far, and the work doesn’t need to be polished to be real.
Hyperlinks + notes
The CORRECT Way to Prototype Apps with AI in 5 Steps | Xinran Ma |
The MacRumors Show: Apple’s Big Plans for iPad Mini 8 → If only the iPad mini had Pro Motion. At this point, I’ll wait for a foldable iPhone
Such a wonderful read, David. Such an important concept of a dedicated physical space of tinkering, of just trying and seeing what happens, making use of spare spaces and of open collaboration with others in an uninterrupted way.
They also play a very important in relationships. Esther Perel writes so well about this referring to it as the “other” internal space, allowing partners to have a space to create and share inviting newness and connection.
I recently discovered that Sydney has some shared makerspaces to emulate this, equipped with tools like 3d printers, and woodworking, sewing and electornics equipment too. They also sometimes have workshops e.g. leatherworks, mechanics etc. which is very cool.
E.g.
Robots & Dinosaurs https://robodino.org/joining
The Making Space @ USNW https://www.unsw.edu.au/arts-design-architecture/our-schools/art-design/campus/the-making-centre
Also, mens sheds for woodworking https://mensshed.org/