This Garage Is Also a Family Home, an Awesome Man Cave, and Gearhead’s Dream Come True

A love for cars takes many forms, as you must know. You’re probably equally familiar with the feeling of not wanting to leave the garage, so you can get a few more minutes of tinkering or simply admiring your car. One man, presumably a gearhead himself, set out to build just the place for that, but minus the feeling of guilt for ignoring your significant other: the ultimate man cave. Which also happens to be a garage. Which happens to be a family home, as well.

We’ve covered automotive-centric real estate before, from mega-mansions with ginormous auto galleries, to smaller estates with sizable garages, and the occasional man cave, built as an attached building to the main house. This is different, because it’s both a garage and a home, and a man cave in one.

It’s a relatively new property in Natick, Massachusetts, listed at $1.45 million. Built in 2014, it looks like a house on the outside, but the interior reveals a 5-car garage with a home attached. This isn’t a typo: you get 3,000 square feet (279 square meters) of interior living space in total, of which 2,000 square feet (186 square meters) are for the cars, and the remaining for living arrangements. You still get a full bedroom and a living room, a kitchen, and one and a half baths, but also a proper bar room, and plenty of space for your tools and yourself to move around.

Styled by architect Patrick Ahearn as a 1930s property, the climate-controlled garage includes five working bays and a two-post lift, with extra space for whatever tools you need to get the job on your cars done. Photos included in the listing show workbenches, storage space and shelving, and desks, as well as a solitary sink right outside the bar room, so you can get cleaned up before heading for a cold one. The floor is hardwood, while the ceiling is copper – for that masculine vibe you’re supposed to expect from a man cave.

The two rooms next to the garage slash workshop area are the bar and the half-bath. They’re both small, but the bar is furnished elegantly (and very manly) in hardwood and leather, with two highchairs around an island, a couple of armchairs, a TV, and a large picture window to allow for plenty of natural light.

The living area is behind barndoor number three, and includes the open-plan kitchen and living room, and the bedroom with ensuite bathroom. While the listing says that this is a family home, it’s probably not envisioned for permanent or long-term living, as evidenced by the fact that the bedroom opens directly into the living room, with no wall or door to separate the two.

That said, the kitchen is spacious and fully-equipped, with a breakfast bar that can seat four people and all the appliances you’d need to put together whatever you will serve on it. The countertops are Carrara marble, and the cabinetry is oak but the retro vibes are consistent, through the inclusion of a vintage-looking cooker and fridge. The living room includes leather furniture (matching the pieces in the bar room) and a gorgeous bookcase, while the bedroom adds a more domestic touch with storage-integrating king-size bed, double wardrobes, a window seat, and lighter colors.

If you think space is cramped for a family home, there is more of it outside: a granite patio that can work wonderfully for slightly larger outdoor dinner parties, a storage shed where you can keep more of your tools and stuff, manicured grounds, and a cobblestone driveway.

Described as a “truly spectacular property,” this garage slash home is “ideal for artists and craftspersons.” But a gearhead (and his friends) would probably feel like a fish in water here.