This project sits on a dense North Center lot, behind a single-family home the owners had already renovated to a high standard. The detached garage had not kept up: it read as a separate, lesser structure, at odds with the century-old brick house it served. The owners, raising a young family in the city, wanted two things from the rear yard: a garage that belonged to the house, and an outdoor room private enough to use after the children were asleep.

Integro demolished the existing garage and built a new one in non-combustible masonry, sized to the maximum width zoning would allow on the lot. Proximity drove the work. On a parcel this tight, the foundation had to clear the neighbors' property lines by inches, which meant measuring, re-measuring, and confirming the layout before any concrete was placed. The new façade was finished in a brick veneer matched to the weathered brick of the existing home, laid so the new structure would read as though it had stood as long as the house. In collaboration with Reveal Design, a custom louvered pergola was fabricated and structurally attached to the garage, extending the roof into open-air living. Beneath it, bluestone and large-format stone pavers were set as the floor of the outdoor room, gas, electric, and water were roughed in underground, and low-maintenance turf, privacy plantings, and trees completed the enclosure.

The result reclaims a constrained urban lot as genuine living space. The garage no longer reads as a separate structure: it carries the house's façade and anchors the yard, while the pergola, the pavers, and the plantings turn the little ground the lot offered into a private retreat. For a family with no room to spare, the rear yard became the part of the property they use most.