Garages That Kick the ‘Man Cave’ Stereotypes to the Curb

Garages have long been little more than a home’s spare space, ideal for storage, fixing up cars and, for some, a small escape with an old couch and mini fridge. But now, mop up those oil spills because there’s no end to the features that can transform it into something a whole lot more enticing.

The idea of making a garage into a refuge probably originated in postwar America, when magazines like Popular Mechanics were full of do-it-yourself plans for transforming your home place with built-ins. Then, the “man cave” of popular imagination had a big heyday in the 1980s, when garages were fitted with TVs, built-in bars, and a microwave for popcorn. These days, garage retreats are getting a bit more sophisticated—and much more functional.

“Our focus is on transforming garages into clean, bright and functional spaces,” Aaron Cash, a co-founder of Garage Living and head of its franchise systems, said. “People do come to us wanting ‘man caves,’ but that’s not our focus. We’re about recognising the value of and reclaiming the space.”

Garage Living now has 45 franchise locations around the U.S., Canada (where the company is based) and Australia. Makeovers range from $20,000 to $100,000. The goal is to get a family’s accumulated “stuff” off the floor and into the company’s own line of powder-coated cabinets, or mounted on the walls and overhead.

Garage Living made over this space with vaulted ceilings and a finished floor.
Garage Living

“This is a growing category,” Cash said. “There’s a lot of interest from an affluent clientele with disposable income.”

Not everyone wants their space uncluttered. Today’s popular accessories for garage makeovers include home theatres, high-tech audio equipment, golf simulators, fireplaces with remotes, wine racks, custom flooring (sometimes heated) and lifts that allow a multi-car collection to be displayed in a smaller space.

Meanwhile, for the auto enthusiast, there are tool chests, rotisseries for working on a car’s underside, pressure washers and compressors, engine hoists, work benches, and more.

Storage space is always at a premium. Levrack, launched in 2016, makes a shelving system that suspends its racks from above. The sections, each with three or more shelves, slide together and apart to maximise space.

Ryan Stauffer, the Nebraska-based co-founder of Levrack, said that 80% to 90% of his company’s business is industrial and commercial, but it’s moving increasingly into residential—with strong buy-in from big car collectors like Jay Leno. The Porsche Classic Factory Restorations facility in Atlanta is also a client.

The Wisconsin- and Nebraska-made units make it possible to collect all the stray tools, cleaners and products that typically live in all corners of the garage and store them out of sight, freeing up a lot of floor space. Units come in seven- to 12-foot widths, with varying depth and height. Prices range up to $7,400 for a 12-foot unit.

Garage Living makeovers range from $20,000 to $100,000.
Garage Living

“We appeal to high-end consumers, people who have a lot of gear,” Stauffer said. “The concept goes back to the 1950s for agriculture, healthcare and other industries, and the racks typically have tracks at the floor level. But in the garage space, where dirt, oil and contamination are an issue, it makes more sense to suspend from the top of the rack.”

Taking the modern garage further still is the Hangar Group, which builds “premier garage condominiums,” where people can store their vehicles in luxury.

The first of these was in Riviera Beach, Florida, completed in 2019—it sold out. And the second is in West Palm Beach, near the airport, with a 2024 completion date. The new facility will have more than 60 units, ranging from 1,500 to 4,500 square feet, with a full-time concierge. There will be a members’ club with golf simulators, a lounge and even a boardroom.

A garage at the Hangar includes a lift to increase auto storage.
THE HANGAR

“What we’re doing is a little different,” said Scott Cunningham, founder and CEO of the Hangar Group. “Some of our customers buy as many as three units and furnish them with high-level amenities like $100,000 wine coolers for their million-dollar collections. We get Fortune 500 executives and equity guys. For some, it becomes like a personal museum—but for security reasons a museum with no windows at street level.”

The Hangar obviously appeals to car collectors, some of them with a dozen or more vehicles, and sponsors track days at nearby race meccas Homestead, Sebring and Daytona.

The Palm Beach location is already 70% sold. A third complex will cater to car collectors in the Hamptons, in New York, and ultimately there will be six to eight locations, he said.

“I’m a Ferrari guy at heart,” he said. “Many of our customers are people, like me, who don’t have room for any more cars at home,” he said. “They once traded in their Ferrari 360 for a 430, but now they want to keep them both.” Often, there’s a guitar collection, too.

The Hangar’s concept is similar to another recent phenomenon—full condominiums, with garages attached, located near race tracks—or with their own. Circuit Florida, between Orlando and Tampa, is one of those. The $90 million complex includes a 1.7-mile private track, with 75 two-story condos. The project is now “six weeks out from the asphalt paving,” according to the company. These are units for serious car people—with garages that will accommodate up to six vehicles.

Space is at a premium in most garages, and Levrack’s “mobile aisle” shelving helps.
Levrack

This article originally appeared on Mansion Global.

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

Garages That Kick the ‘Man Cave’ Stereotypes to the Curb

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.