Ryan Homes catalog shows shrubs planted in front of garage door

Three cheers for Ryan Homes in Plain Township, OH. They sell houses with shrubbery planted in front of the garage doors to discourage car ownership. Plus, every house comes with a goat and a cart to transport occupants to the local WalMart!

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

bbonyx

Heh. Nice. But, as I’m sure plenty are about to chime in on… That’s in all likelihood the “model home” where they generally block the garage, which has been turned into an office for the realtors to do business, so that the rest of the home remains as it will be to the buyer. These are usually reconverted later and the driveway paved in normally if the model is sold. Not an uncommon sight at all here in the burgeoning ‘burbs of Texas. One in every development, near the entrance.
- Conspirator
  
  Yep, that’s exactly what they did in my subdivision when they were building it. The three model homes did not have driveways, although two of them had garages. They wanted to pretty up the front yard with lots of grass and plants rather than boring concrete.
  - bbonyx
    
    Yup. A key reason why I bought my house in a neighborhood that has alleys and garage entries in back. I hate that basically all of North/Central TX is now just endless rows of nothing but garage doors and driveways facing the streets instead of genuine front yards. Pack ‘em in as tightly as possible, I get it. But not very pretty/appealing.
    - jerwin
      
      In certain locales, all you see from the road is the garage. The rest of the house sprawls down the hillside, out of sight.
    - cowtown
      
      Right. Even the builders know it looks horrible for a house to be dominated by a gaping maw of a garage, so they do this for the models to break up the monotonous lines when they’re creating a first impression, especially before the rest of the non-models are ready.
      
      We bought a tract home (renting it out now, who can sell without taking a bath, even in Texas?), but for our sanity we had to find a neighborhood that did a cutesy little cape-cod-esque thing and has alleys with back garages. I know it doesn’t make it non-cookie cutter, but at least it wasn’t the first cookie cutter on the rack.
captaintrips

You know when you start in the 140s you’re going to be missing something things…..

Ah heck, whom am I kidding, homes are cheap around here, it’s not a California housing ponzi scheme.
- bbonyx
  
  OT: Great alias. RF for the win! My fav King novel, even with the lame deus ex ending.
dollarbin

The shrubs in front of the garage don’t bother me as much as the fact that the house appears to be two dimensional. Look on the right side: there’s no right side.
- Cubey
  
  I imagine that’s because it’s a triangular house, so only the longest side is visible from that angle.
- dculberson
  
  It’s just the Bluths, proving that they can build a model home!
- KBert
  
  The front door leads to the living space… in the finished basement (free!)
  Of course the 1st bit of wind exposes the reality.
- Pag
  
  The right side of the house isn’t lacking, it’s just a trick of perspective. The shot was most likely taken with a wide-angle lens which amplify the effect of perspective and the photographer wasn’t past the edge of the right wall, so he couldn’t see it.
  
  What’s throwing you off is that there’s no vertical perspective. Notice how the vertical lines of the walls are perfectly vertical even though the photo is obviously looking up. The vertical perspective was corrected by widening the top of the picture just enough to make the vertical lines all parallel. It’s a very common thing that’s done in a lot of photos of buildings to make them look better.
Palefire

Well, in my neighborhood no one parks in their garage anyway. The garage is where people put their junk they don’t need and will never use again. So, I think the picture unintentionally makes sense.
- GregS
  
  Well, that’s what people do when they live in Hoarderville!
http://chrisbachmann.com Chris Bachmann

Mr. Ryan used to live down the street from where I grew up. Wonder what he would have thought of this.
Roy Trumbull

I once worked in radio with a guy who was trained as an architect. He was doing sales. I asked him why he quit the other. In the days before CAD the junior member of the team got to do things like draw in the johns on every floor of a high rise. Didn’t take much of that to convince him he was in the wrong game. But these weird illustrations look like the revenge of a jr. architect. There’s one pix that made the rounds showing the driveway of a home lined up with a phone pole at the curb. Looking at the right side of the illustration makes me wonder if M. C. Escher lived there.
Antinous / Moderator

Say, that’s swanky. I may just replace my spike strips.
http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

This would be good enough for the Bluth Company.
OohErMissus

The things some people do just to eliminate the greenhouse gasses that escape their garage as they idle, waiting for their spouse to finish up and join them in the car….
http://democracylight.blogspot.com/ Art

I guess there’s a very tiny chance they’re into this:
http://carfree.com/
http://twitter.com/ColumbusArea Adolph Marx

At least five of the six styles of houses in the development have this problem. I didn’t think Canton had such walkable suburbs…
http://www.ryanhomes.com/community/ohio/lexington-farms
dwasifar karalahishipoor

Of all the…

Five seconds of thought should dispel the idea that they planted shrubs in front of the garage to discourage driving. Start the stopwatch: If the house was for people without cars, it WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE A GARAGE.

The people who identify this as a temporary model home show display are correct.
caferacers66 66

As a former landscaper here in Florida I have seen worse transgressions and given our traffic I would applaud if i saw this. Though the goats would not make it here too many Pythons and Anacondas. Shame really.
Garrett Eaton

I’m sorry, but I think this is just a trick of perspective… Those shrubs are following the path as it leads up a gentle slope towards the camera. The drive is on the other side of the berm. It is probably taken with a long lens so there isn’t much change in scale as the shrubs come closer to us (not to mention that shrubs tend vary in size anyway).

Or am I missing the point?
- WhyBother
  
  No, the shrubs really are in front of the house. It’s a model home. As has been said before, the garage is built out as an office for subdivision. When there are no other houses left to sell, they’ll rip out the shrubs and offices, put in a driveway, and sell the model. It’s weird that they even have a garage door here, since they usually replaced those with French doors while the model is active.
  
  In other words, this image is only peculiar if you’ve never gone to look at homes for sale in a new subdivision.
  - Garrett Eaton
    
    I see. Weirdness wins again.
Snig

For hovercraft. Shrubs are there to keep cars out.
GIFtheory

‘shopped. I can tell by the shrubbery.
mellowknees

Okay, really…no one blames PhotoShop for this? Or am I missing sarcasm because this is all text and I can’t hear it…
- WhyBother
  
  I could blame photoshop for ti, but there’s no point. I could also blame photoshop for the picture of Nixon and Elvis shaking hands in the oval office. Unfortunately, both of these things are real. No shopping required. I’m a little surprised it was even worth noting.
http://twitter.com/ManekiNico Maneki Nico

— Firstly, you must find…. ANOTHER SHRUBBERY!!!
— Oh not *another* shrubbery!!
— THEN… Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must place it here, beside this shrubbery, only slightly higher, so we get the two-level effect with a little path running down the middle.
— A path! A path! A path! Shh, shhh. Ni! Ni!
— Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest tree in the [subdivision]… wiiiiiithh…. A HERRING!
Model Citizen

I see shrubs in front of garage doors frequently in real estate ads here in South Florida.
ackpht

No problem at all for motorcycles.

A lot of tract houses these days are all front- nice front yard, tall, sloped roof with multiple dormers, very impressive- but go around back, and it’s a vertical wall three feet from the property line.
pjcamp

How do you know it isn’t flip-down shrubbery like the ones in front of the Bat Cave? Now that would be cool!
sour60

this looks like the house, the driveway is not there as stated above because it’s a model home…there is a mini parking lot out of view.
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.875535,-81.350797&spn=0.000507,0.000862&t=h&z=20&vpsrc=6&lci=com.panoramio.all
InsertFingerHere

Ya, you think there’s a gdamn luscious park in your front yard, of course it makes the house look nicer. But your actual house is 75% concrete driveway that will crack in 1 year.

tract homes like these are the worst built shit you can buy. Only one in 10 get inspected and more money is spent on faucets & taps than foundation waterproofing.

A new development went up here in the city, around a long time soil company. Few years ago the company started to offer commercial and residential compost pickup. Area residents are infuriated and complain of the (supposed) smell. Half don’t know they are less than 2km from the city’s largest landfill. And the development was touted as a massive geothermal project (which was cut out of the plan after all the community approvals were gotten).

Some people have no souls.
susiesharp

Folks, this is not a photo, it is a rendering and the computer artist ought to have his hat handed to him for an error of this magnitude!
chris23

Developers should definitely do this in the SF Bay Area since most people have to rent out their garage to students in order to afford the mortgage.
http://twitter.com/Jokerswild1138 JokersWild1138

What I want to know is, WHO IS BUILDING NEW HOMES in this housing market?
patelanjali

That’s in all likelihood the “model home” where they generally block the garage, which has been turned into an office for the realtors to do business.
http://twitter.com/cicadamania Cicada Mania

Garages rarely function as car storage these days, so this photo makes perfect sense. Either your giant SUV can’t fit in the garage, or your kids moved back in and are living in the garage. The folks in my condo complex (yuk) park their huge ass SUVs outside the garage, and then use the garage as their front door. Annoying.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_LPTDNOEDSAU6F7RQJHIJ44Y5KM funchy crunchy

It’s a MODEL HOME. The realtor’s office in a home that small is often located in the garage. They might have big displays in there of the other floor plans and development’s plan. The model home is the last one to sell usually. At which point, they turn the office back into a garage, pave the driveway, and fix and wear-and-tear.
wasteoftime29

This is a model home.They do this because during construction the garage is used as a sales office. Do you really think if this was photoshopped that they wouldnt have made the grass greener, the tree have leaves, and the shrubs better looking? You may not like new home builders but the people working there are not idiots.
Guest

It comes with a goat?

Well, that should take care of the shrubs…
秀平月

Just checking, does anyone think that this might be a model home? Strange that nobody has mentioned that yet…
anpf

Here is another example by NVHomes (a sister company of Ryan Homes) in suburban Maryland.