Budget Breakdown: This $153K Garage Retrofit Is the "Taj Mahal of ADUs"

What do you call it when a couple with an underutilized three-car garage accidentally find themselves at dinner with an architect specializing in ADU design? A meet-cute? Kismet? Opportunity? While the specific terminology may be subject to interpretation, there’s really only one word for Ross and Shannon Lohr’s newly renovated guesthouse: ingenious.

Ross and Shannon Lohr (both entrepreneurs in the fashion industry) moved to Carlsbad, California, from Boston in 2019. They loved their craftsman-style house, blocks from the beach, and it came with a high-ceilinged garage that the former owner used to house his collection of classic cars.

"We’ve been city dwellers our whole lives—we had one car, and we were happy to find parking on the street," says Ross. "We had this space just sitting there—the width of our property—and we started thinking about how we might use it in a way that made sense and added value."

When they were introduced at a dinner party to architect Ramiro Losada-Amor, a friend-of-a-friend and founder of Modern Granny Flat, the solution easily presented itself. "It was a lightbulb moment for us," says Ross. Losada-Amor quickly got to work sketching out plans to transform the garage into a hyper-efficient, light-filled home for guests or long-term renters.