At 400 square feet, the garage at John Garbarino’s recently-purchased home in Maplewood, New Jersey, is bigger than any room in his house. It boasts a soaring cathedral ceiling and an interior outfitted entirely with antique wood. Upon move-in, it needed a new floor, but he and his wife weren’t planning on parking their cars there anyhow. For Garbarino, a recent SoHo transplant still adjusting to suburban life, the novelty of owning a garage presented a different opportunity. “I thought, maybe I could design this to look like Spring Lounge, my old local,” he explains, naming the famed Lower East Side dive bar where, coincidentally, he first met his wife. Working in mobile design and development by trade, he wasn’t exactly Bob Vila. So he started simple, with a floor-model TV from Best Buy and a Kegerator. It became a place where he and a few friends could hang out at night without worrying about waking the kids up—a strange inverse of teenagers drinking in their parent’s garage to avoid detection. By 2011, he had the gumption to try and actually build a proper bar. Garbarino’s initial blueprints were thrown off early on by his own lack of carpentry experience. (He failed to realize, for instance, that 2x4s did not actually measure two inches by four inches.) Eventually, he managed to fashion a wooden bar with oak veneer railings; he bought church pews on Craigslist and installed a fireplace he found on Facebook Marketplace; he added decorations his wife wouldn’t let him display in the house, like a Donovan McNabb Philadelphia Eagles jersey and an antique rotary club sign. Soon his friends started donating stuff—one gave him stools, another found a bar mirror in Massachusetts—which was quickly integrated into the decor.
