The owner’s reception we never got around to designing, and what a Japanese sensibility has to say about it.
The front door and entry of your home is one of the most considered pieces in the overall design. The timber, the handle, the covered porch, the way the door meets the house and the sightline you catch of the hallway as it swings open. With a well-designed home, you know the front door was agonised over.
And yet, you almost never use it.
For most Australians the front door is for other people. The door we actually use, every day, often multiple times a day, is a roller door at the end of a driveway. We press a button, it rises, we park, we step out of the car and we are home. That is the moment of arrival for the people who actually live in the house and in most Australian homes the room they are arriving into has never been designed.
In a hotel, the reception is one of the most considered rooms in the building. The lighting, the materials, the sightlines, the small ceremony of being welcomed and set at ease. In most Australian homes the owner has a reception of their own. It is where they land every day. Nobody has designed it.
That is the quiet problem I want to talk about. This should be one of the most interesting conversations in Australian residential design right now and we have barely started having it.
A sense of arrival
Every house has a sense of arrival. Architects and Designers spend real time on it and so they should. There is the façade and how the home sits in its environment, whether that is streetscape or natural terrain. The pedestrian walkway up to the front door. The covered threshold, the pause, the quiet moment of transition. Then the door itself and the foyer beyond. Somewhere to hang a coat. Somewhere to drop keys. A piece of art, a sculpture or deliberate emptiness. Sightlines managed so a guest does not look straight into private space. The home opens up to them while quietly holding something back.
In Japan that threshold is made explicit. When you walk through the front door of a Japanese home you step into the genkan, a tiled zone at ground level. You stand there in your shoes, slip them off and step up onto the raised floor of the home proper. It is only a step or two but it is a world. The ceremony of leaving one and entering the other is built into the architecture itself, not left to the occupant or guest to improvise.
Here in Australia the ceremony is quieter, but it is still there. The front door is the threshold. The foyer is the welcome. These are rooms we care about and spend money on.
But almost none of us use them.
“The owner’s front door is a garage door. The owner’s foyer is a concrete slab.”
The owner’s front door is the garage
Most Australian homes have a garage, which is often their entry point to the home. The considered front door, with its covered porch and its welcome mat and its carefully chosen handle, is for guests, deliveries and relatives who visit from interstate.
The owner’s front door is a garage door. The owner’s foyer is a concrete slab, an exposed ceiling, a tangle of extension leads, a bike that fell over last Tuesday and a bag of sports gear in the corner. There is no layering of light. There is no considered material. There is no step up from the earth zone to the raised floor. There is no genkan. There is no welcome at all.
This is the room the owner sees first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Every grocery run. Every school pick up. Every time they come home from a long day. By any honest measure of use and visibility the garage should be one of the most carefully designed rooms in the house. Instead, it is the only room we have collectively agreed not to design at all.
Shoes off, and the respect of two spaces
The Japanese habit of removing shoes at the genkan is not a quaint ritual. It is a working line drawn between the outside world and the inside one. The outside world is dirty. Footpaths, driveways, roads, public spaces are not sanitised. You would not eat your dinner off a footpath and if you dropped a sandwich on one you would not pick it up. Yet in most Australian homes we spend hours each week mopping and vacuuming and polishing floors we are perfectly happy to walk across in the same shoes that just carried us through all of that.
Growing up on a farm you learn the rule early. Your outside shoes have dirt on them, that is their job and they stay outside. On entering the home you leave them behind. The acknowledgement of two different spaces, with two different levels of cleanliness and two different jobs, is practical before it is cultural. The Japanese have simply taken that same instinct further. They have formalised it, built architecture around it and turned it into a small daily theatre. The genkan. The step up. The row of indoor slippers waiting on the raised floor. It is quiet, it is efficient and it works.
We are starting to see this instinct arrive in Australian homes in the form of the mudroom. A dedicated place to hang coats and umbrellas, drop boots, set wet gear down and then transition properly into the house. It is a real step in the right direction. The interesting thing is where the mudroom lives. It is almost never off the main entry. It is almost always off the garage. Which is to say that it is halfway to solving the problem this piece is really about. The mudroom is quietly acknowledging that the garage is where people actually arrive. We just have not finished the thought and designed the room they arrive into.
The master ensuite argument
There is a quick way to settle whether a room deserves attention. Ask who sees it and how often. The master ensuite is a useful case. No guest tours it. It is not where the social life of the house happens and yet owners happily spend serious money making it beautiful. Stone, brass, soft light, careful material, generous space. We do all of this because the room is ours and we see it morning and night. It deserves the care.
The garage is the same logic in a different position on the plan. It is the owner’s room. It is one of the most used rooms in the house. It just happens to sit at the front of the house instead of the back and it just happens to also hold a car. Every other part of the master ensuite argument applies. The only reason the garage does not get the master ensuite treatment is that we have not been shown what that would look like yet.
“The garage is a master ensuite we have agreed not to design.”
What Japan does with a space
Japanese architecture is, among other things, a long essay on the subject of not wasting space. In Japanese homes space is treated as a precious material in its own right, like timber or stone. It is used, folded, concealed and revealed with the same care. A room that reads as a tatami lounge during the day becomes a bedroom at night when the futon is unrolled. A corridor can turn into a tea space. A sliding fusuma can make one room into two or two rooms into one. A shoji screen can let the morning light in without letting the morning in with it. Every square metre is asked to earn its presence, and the architecture gives it a way to do so.
Set that sensibility beside the typical Australian garage and the comparison is uncomfortable. The garage is often the largest single room in the house. It is lit by one batten and lined by cold hard surfaces. Half of its volume holds a car. The rest holds whatever did not fit elsewhere, piled high, visible from the moment the roller door lifts. From a Japanese perspective that is an enormous amount of real estate asked to do very little. It is the opposite of discipline. It is waste at the front of the house.
The honest version of that observation is not that the garage should be smaller. It is that the garage should be asked to do more. More storage, in considered joinery. More calm, through layered lighting. More softness, through finished walls and ceilings. More transition, through a proper threshold between garage and house. More purpose, through a cellar, a workshop zone, a gym, a hobby bay, a quiet corner. A Japanese sensibility would not look at the typical Australian garage and want to shrink it. It would want to put it to work.
Shoji and fusuma, and the Australian storage problem
The Australian answer to garage storage is a steel shelf and a bare pegboard. The Japanese approach, worked out over centuries, is to conceal the working parts of a room behind a surface that is itself a design feature. Fusuma are solid sliding panels that close off a cupboard or an entire room. Shoji are their translucent cousins, filtered with washi paper, that let soft light through while separating one zone from another. Both do the same job. They turn storage into joinery. They turn clutter into a wall. They let a room be two things at once and they let the occupant choose which thing it is at any given moment.
A garage with a shoji front across one wall is a different room when the panels are open and a different room again when they are closed. Open, the tools are at hand, the project is on the bench, the gear is accessible, the workshop is working. Closed, the wall is clean and softly lit, the room is calm, the car is parked in what looks like a gallery rather than a shed. The storage has not gone anywhere. It is simply no longer in charge of the way the room feels.
That shift, from storage controlling the aesthetic to the aesthetic controlling the storage, is one of the most useful things a Japanese design sensibility can bring to the Australian garage. We have been canvassing creative alternative solutions for these spaces for years and it starts here.
The garage door and the front of the house
While we are on the subject of surfaces, a word on the garage door itself. It is the single largest visual element on the front of most Australian homes. It dominates the façade in a way no other feature is allowed to and in most projects it is picked from a swatch at the end of the day and fitted without further thought. It sits across the elevation like a television on a lounge room wall. A focal point we have agreed not to look at.
The garage door can be integrated into the façade. It can be panelised to match the cladding, concealed inside a timber batten screen, set flush, softened with planting, backlit or hidden entirely when closed. The techniques exist. The products exist. What is missing is the brief. If the garage is treated as a service room the door that leads into it will be treated as a service door. If the garage is treated as a room, the door will be treated as part of the architecture.
What a reconsidered garage actually looks like
A designed garage does not stop being a garage. The car still parks. The tools still live there. The bikes still hang on the wall. What changes is the way the room holds those things and the way it greets the person who uses it. Finished ceilings, with layered light, replace the exposed structure and the single batten. Shoji or timber facades let the storage be present when you want it and tucked away when you do not. The floor becomes a surface rather than a slab. The step from garage to house becomes a moment, with care given to light, to material and to the handover from one space to the other.
Where there is a cellar, which is more and more often the case, the cellar becomes the hero of the room. Lit, framed, visible through glass, it anchors the garage the way a fireplace anchors a lounge. The space stops reading as a service area and starts reading as the entry gallery of the home. The garage, finally, is the first room worth meeting every morning and the last room worth leaving every night.
A space for gathering, and for expression
Something interesting happens to a well finished garage when the car is pulled out of it. A floor that is already warm, lighting that is already considered, walls that are already lined with care. Suddenly the room starts to behave less like a garage and more like the biggest, most generous room in the house. The living room was never going to hold the numbers anyway. The dining room certainly was not. Kids’ birthdays, twenty firsts, big family gatherings, work functions, Christmas Eve drinks, Melbourne Cup lunches. The garage, when you let it, hosts the kind of gathering the rest of the house was never sized for.
Add a bar, a cellar as the hero of the wall, a gallery hang, a sound system and some well placed light. Now the garage is the centrepiece of the function. Food comes out of the bench. People move freely between the garage, the covered edge of the house and the garden beyond. The threshold the owner uses every day becomes the room everyone wants to be in when there is something worth celebrating.
“Suddenly the garage is the biggest and most generous room in the house.”
More than any other room in the house, it is also the room that can be truly personalised. A main home carries the owner’s taste quietly. Architects, interior designers and designers tread carefully with the colour palette, the texture palette and the continuity of the whole. People’s quirks and specific interests often get left out of that language because they do not sit easily within it. The garage carries none of that pressure. It can be the fly fisher’s gallery, the sewer’s studio, the lawn bowler’s clubhouse, the golfer’s quiet room. It can tie in sincerely with the rest of the home or it can run deliberately against it. Either way the room is treated with respect, and it earns its personality the honest way.
The basement and where it overlaps
Something similar is happening below ground. We are being asked, more and more often, to carve a basement into bespoke builds, and the brief that comes with it has shifted. Owners are paying a premium for land, and when height restrictions, overshadowing rules, setback envelopes and the broader weight of planning regulations begin to dictate the shape and the feel of a house to its detriment, the design starts to look for somewhere to breathe. Underground is where it finds the room.
Drop a light court or two in the right places and a well-designed basement reads like an above ground room. Natural light lands where it should. The return on the owner’s land investment lifts. And the kinds of rooms that end up down there are telling. We are seeing more and more personal, wellness and play spaces. Saunas, steam rooms, change rooms, massage rooms, salt rooms, spas, plunge pools hot and cold. It is a quiet play on the onsen and the ryokan tradition, the Japanese discipline of carving out a dedicated space for wellness, rest and the deliberate business of leaving the world behind. Bringing that sensibility into the home turns something you used to wait for a holiday to find into a daily routine.
On larger sites, especially rural ones with room to spread out, a lot of this same thinking lands in the garage instead of in the basement. Above ground rather than below. The gym, the home gym, the onsen, the change rooms, a powder room, a shower, the proper storage to make the whole thing work. The cinema room, the golf driving range, the sewing studio with the thread library on the wall. The garage, the basement and the wellness space start to blur into one answer. A part of the home dedicated to the owner’s own life, finally designed with the same seriousness as the rooms the guests see.
A note inspired from The Block
We spent time on The Block recently working on cellars for two of the houses and the experience sharpened something I have been noticing across our own projects for a while. The homes being built and renovated in Australia right now are more considered than ever in every room except one. Kitchens attract serious money. Bathrooms get stone and brass. Outdoor rooms get pizza ovens and sunken firepits. The garage still gets a roller door and an unpainted ceiling.
Interestingly, on The Block the garage and the landscape were paired into a single reveal week, as if the two were part of the same conversation. They are not. The landscape is its own room (an extension of the house), and the garage is its own room. Both deserve a week of their own with the same seriousness that gets given to the kitchen. A full week on The Block on Channel Nine dedicated to the garage as its own designed room — ceilings, lighting, floors, concealed joinery, a cellar in some of the homes, a workshop in others, a hobby space or even a gallery wall or gallery space and a sense of arrival worth celebrating. And while we are at it, let’s rename the garage. “The owner’s reception” feels about right.
Where this is coming from
A short word on where this thinking is drawn from, because I think it matters when the argument is this contrarian.
I have been building homes in Australia for a little over 30 years. I started as a young carpenter. I now hold an architectural drafting, a residential and a commercial building licence, and I run First Impressions Projects, where we design and build and project manage bespoke work.
We have been fortunate enough to be acknowledged through 30-plus industry awards during that time.
The Japanese thread in all of this started in the 1990s, when I lived and worked in Japan as a young carpenter. One of the jobs I worked on in that period was carpentry on the Consul General’s residence in Kobe, which was a hugely influential time for me. Visiting and working in Japan has quietly become a yearly rhythm ever since, less a trip now and more a way of life.
The Japanese sensibility now touches everything we do, with its clearest acknowledgement in the fine woodworking and the Japanese design that runs through a small cluster of businesses that all talk to each other in one way or another.
Cellar Creations, where we design and build generational pieces that celebrate wood and woodworking for the people who commission them and the people who behold them. Shoji Tatami Co., which handcrafts shoji and imports fusuma and tatami work from makers in Japan. 2 Market Australasia, our product sourcing business between Japan, broader Asia and the Australasian building market. Japandi Homes Australia, where the two sensibilities meet in whole homes. And RR Creative Studio, where some of the thinking and doing gets filmed and shared.
I say all that only because what you are reading did not come from a Pinterest board. It came from standing in Japanese homes, building Australian ones and spending 30 years travelling back and forth noticing which lessons from one country land in the other. The garage is the lesson that has been waiting the longest.
Why this is a happy problem
Here is the good news in all of this. The fix is not heroic. The materials exist. The techniques exist. The craft, both Japanese and Australian, exists. The clients, when shown what is possible, respond quickly and generously. The homes already have the volume. The garage is already there, waiting to be asked a better question.
What is required is a shift in attention. A willingness to treat the garage as a room from the first design meeting, not the last. A willingness to brief it, budget for it and defend it through the inevitable value engineering conversations. A willingness, borrowed respectfully from Japan, to treat space itself as a material and to refuse to waste the biggest single room at the front of the house.
Done well, the garage becomes the entry gallery of the home. Soft light, considered material, the cellar as the hero of the room, the storage tucked behind a shoji wall, the step up from the garage floor into the house feeling like a step up in every sense. Done well, the owner’s experience of coming home finally matches the care that went into the front door nobody uses.
“The garage is already there, waiting to be asked a better question.”
This should be one of the most exciting conversations in Australian residential design and it has barely started. We will be writing more on it, building more of it and showing more of it in the months ahead. The next piece in this Journal will go deeper into what one of these reconsidered garages actually looks like when it is built.
The front door most of us never use is still waiting. The one we actually walk through every day is ready for its moment.
Robert Rolls – Cellar Creations
Builder, Designer and Director of the following companies
October 2026 · Journal Issue 2