This stone-and-stucco Mountain Craftsman has an 850-square-foot apartment above the three-car garage, with a kitchen, bedroom, bath and sun deck all its own. A parent or a grown child could live there, close by but without sharing your kitchen. Its 850 square feet come on top of the main house’s 3,683, and you could even leave it unfinished until someone needs it.
I’ll walk you through the main floor from the front porch, then upstairs to the bedrooms and the apartment, back down through the garage, out to the patio and into the basement. The drawings below show the main floor first, then the upstairs and the apartment.
Specifications:
- 3,683 Heated s.f.
- 4-5 Beds
- 3.5-4.5 Baths
- 2 Stories
- 3 Cars
The Floor Plans:
The Front Porch
The covered porch stretches across the middle of the front, with pairs of wood posts holding up a metal roof. The walls are gray stucco, with stone on the front gable and along the base of the garage wing.
The house is 105 feet wide, about a third of a football field, and the garage wing makes up its right end. From the street, that wing shows a row of ground-floor windows instead of garage doors, because all three doors face the side of the lot. The apartment sits upstairs, behind the windows set into the roof above them.
At the right end of the porch, nearest the garage, a second door with a few steps of its own opens straight into the mudroom. Muddy boots from the yard never have to cross the foyer. We’ll see that room from the inside later, when we come in from the garage.
Let’s go in the front door.
The Main Level Floor Plan
The Foyer, Den and Powder Room
The foyer rises two full stories, and overhead you see the railing of the upstairs hall. Just inside the front door, a little hall on the left leads to the den, with a powder room right beside it. The den has a closet and front windows, and it makes a quiet office or reading room.
On the right, a short arched hallway leads to the dining room. The hallway’s ceiling curves overhead like the inside of a barrel, and along it are a coat closet on one side and a bench under a window on the other.
Farther in, the staircase climbs to a landing and turns. At the top it comes out on the bridge, an upstairs hall that runs between the tall foyer and the great room like a balcony. Beside the bottom step, a second flight goes down to the basement, and that’s the last stop on the tour.
Straight ahead, past the stairs, the foyer opens into the great room.
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The Great Room
The fireplace wall is on the left as you come in. In the finished house, it’s gray stone from the floor all the way up, with a thick wood beam for a mantel. The back wall is mostly glass, with a wide set of glass doors to the covered patio and tall windows above them, so daylight reaches all the way up to the peak.
Overhead, the ceiling rises to a peak more than 20 feet above the floor, about twice the height of the ceilings in the rest of the main floor. The bridge crosses along the front of the room, so someone upstairs can lean on the railing and call down to the sofa.
All that open air carries sound. A television down here is easy to hear from the bridge and the bedrooms off it, and that’s worth knowing before the big TV goes up beside the fireplace.
The right side, across from the fireplace, is open to the kitchen, and from there the cook can see the fire and the patio.
The Kitchen and Walk-In Pantry
The kitchen and the great room are the same size, each about 19 feet square, so the cooking side of the house gets as much floor as the sitting side. In the middle is an island 11 feet long, with the double sink, the dishwasher and a counter-height eating bar for four stools. That’s long enough for one person to rinse vegetables at the sink while someone else has coffee at the far end.
French doors in the kitchen’s back wall open to the patio, and the range on the side wall is a 48-inch model, the wide size you see in restaurant kitchens. Across from the French doors, a coffee bar with a small sink sits beside a second arched hallway, this one into the dining room.
Just past the range, an opening leads to a short back hall, and the walk-in pantry opens off it. It’s about the size of a small bedroom, and it works as a second, smaller kitchen, with counters on three sides and a double sink under a window. That’s the third sink on this side of the house, after the island and the coffee bar. Messy jobs like soaking the roasting pan can happen in there while the main kitchen stays tidy for company.
From the kitchen, the arched hallway by the coffee bar leads into the dining room.
The Dining Room
This room has a coffered ceiling, a grid of deep beams that divides it into square panels. Every beam is built and trimmed in place, which is why a coffered ceiling costs more than a flat one. Four tall windows look out past the porch posts to the drive and the front yard.
Dinner comes in from the kitchen through one of the arched hallways, and guests come in from the foyer through the other. The cook never carries plates past the front door, and the dishes go back to the kitchen the same short way. With the kitchen only one arch away, it’s an easy room to use on ordinary weeknights, too.
The owners’ suite is on the other side of the house, past the foot of the stairs and beside the great room.
The Owners’ Suite
The owners’ bedroom has its own fireplace, set in the middle of the back wall, with a set of French doors on each side opening onto the covered patio. It’s one of three fireplaces in the house, along with the great room’s and one out on the patio. Three more windows on the side wall give the room light from two directions.
A short passage from the bedroom runs between two walk-in closets, and hers is quite a bit bigger than his. At the end is the bath, with a freestanding tub under the windows, a double vanity and a make-up counter. The shower is a walk-in, with no tub wall to step over.
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The owners’ suite is the only bedroom on the main floor, so everyday life can stay on one level, with the upstairs left to family and guests. A Craftsman whose owners’ suite fills a whole end of the house goes a step further, adding a sitting room with a second fireplace. From here, it’s back to the stairs and up.
The Upstairs Hall and Bedrooms
Up on the bridge, the great room drops away on one side and the foyer on the other, with a railing along each edge. The ceilings up here are 9 feet, a foot lower than downstairs.
The bedroom at the top of the stairs sits right above the owners’ suite. It has a closet and a private bath with a shower. A guest who stays the week never has to share a bathroom.
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The other two bedrooms are at the far end of the bridge, one looking out the back of the house and one out the front. Each has a walk-in closet, and they share a hall bath with a tub and two sinks. That puts the guests at one end of the upstairs and the kids or grandkids at the other, with the open hall between them.
Past those two bedrooms and a linen closet is the upstairs laundry room, with a washer, a dryer, a sink and a window, right where the bedroom hampers are. It also has a second door on its far wall, and that door opens into the apartment.
The Apartment’s Bath, Living Room and Bedroom
The laundry door brings you into a little hall with a linen closet, a pantry closet and the apartment’s bathroom, which has a tub. The apartment has no washer, so the two households share that laundry, and they can visit back and forth without going outside.
From the hall you step into the living room. It sits in the middle, between the kitchen and the bedroom, and it keeps the clatter of breakfast dishes away from the bed. Windows along the side wall look out over the side yard.
The bedroom is at the front, with a double-door closet. Its windows are the ones you saw set into the roof from the street. At about 12 by 14 feet, it’s bigger than any bedroom upstairs in the main house. This bedroom and the bath off the little hall are the fifth bedroom and the extra bath in the specs.
The kitchen is back through the living room.
The Apartment’s Kitchen and Sun Deck
Counters turn a corner here, with the double sink on one side and the range and refrigerator on the other, leaving room in the middle for a small table. It’s a real kitchen rather than a kitchenette, with two windows in its back wall. The drawings show no dishwasher, though, and if someone will live up here for years, it’s an easy thing to ask for while the cabinets are being ordered.
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A door in the kitchen’s back corner opens onto the sun deck, with room for a table, chairs and a grill, and in good weather meals can move out there. Down on the ground, the deck roofs over an open-sided covered area.
Right beside the deck door, a flight of stairs leads back down.
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The Apartment’s Own Stairs and Entrance
The stairs run down inside the garage wing, along its back wall, to a landing and an outside door. A few steps lead down to the side yard. Visitors and groceries can come and go that way without anyone walking through your house or the garage. Under the upper part of the stairs is a storage room with a door out to the covered area beneath the deck, handy for patio chairs.
Every way into the apartment is up a flight of stairs, which matters if a parent will live there into old age. These stairs are one straight flight, the easiest kind to fit with a stair lift. According to the home-cost guide Fixr, a lift for straight stairs usually costs $2,000 to $8,000 installed. The few steps outside the door would still need a sturdy rail or a small ramp. Along that same side of the house are the three garage doors.
The Three-Car Garage and the Mudroom
The two bays nearer the front are open to each other, with a door for each. The third bay, at the back, is about 31 feet deep, roughly the length of two family sedans parked nose to tail. It has a workbench along its inside wall and a taller door, 11 feet high.
The plan’s listing calls this an RV garage, and the back bay is the one meant for it. A camper van fits through its door, but many motorhomes with a bed over the cab stand too tall for it.
From the garage, a door leads into the back hall beside the kitchen, and the mudroom opens off the same hall. The mudroom runs all the way through to the front porch, and it’s the room behind that second door out front. It’s also the main-floor laundry, with lockers for coats, boots and bags on one wall, facing the washer, the dryer and a utility sink.
In most houses with an attached garage, the door in from the garage becomes the one the family uses every day, and this plan puts the lockers right where everyone comes in. With a laundry on each floor, nobody hauls baskets up and down the stairs. For a bigger version of this garage wing, another Craftsman with a studio apartment puts 985 square feet above a six-car garage.
Now let’s go back through the kitchen and out to the patio.
The Covered Patio and Outdoor Kitchen
The covered patio runs along most of the back of the house, and you step out beside its outdoor kitchen. Under its roof there’s a little more floor than in the whole apartment over the garage, about 875 square feet to the apartment’s 850.
The middle part, right outside the great room, has the third fireplace, an outdoor one under a peaked ceiling as tall as the great room’s. When the glass doors are open, the great room and the patio run together, and dinner can go straight from the outdoor kitchen to the fire. At the far end, just outside the owners’ bedroom, is a quieter spot for morning coffee.
Because the outdoor kitchen is drawn into the plan, its gas and power lines can go in with the house instead of being trenched in later. Most homeowners spend around $16,500 on an outdoor kitchen, according to HomeAdvisor’s 2026 cost guide, and the grill, counters and appliances you choose move that up or down. A modern mountain plan with an outdoor kitchen is another house built for cooking outside, with its grill and fireplace side by side right off the kitchen.
The Second Level Floor Plan
The Basement
Back inside, the last stop is the basement, down the flight of stairs by the foyer. The plan’s listing also offers a layout for finishing it, which would add about 2,600 square feet with a game room, a bar with an island, a media room, a gym, a bedroom and a bath.
That layout gives the game room glass doors out to the yard, which suits a sloping lot and brings daylight into the lowest floor. Finishing a basement runs about $7 to $23 a square foot, going by HomeAdvisor’s numbers, depending on where you live and the finishes you pick. Plenty of owners finish a basement in stages, starting with the rooms they’ll use first.
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Some of the choices on this plan are much cheaper to make before the house is built than after.
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Start with the basement. Even if you won’t finish it for years, have the plumber put in the drains for the bath and the bar before the basement floor is poured, since adding them later means cutting through the concrete.
Then there’s heating and cooling for the apartment. Rooms over a garage tend to run hot in summer and cold in winter, and a ductless mini split, a wall unit with a small compressor outside, gives them a thermostat of their own. HomeAdvisor’s figures put a system with one indoor unit at $2,400 to $5,500 installed, and each extra room adds another unit. The pipes and wiring are easiest to run while the walls are still open.
Last, decide how separate the two households should be. The laundry door is the only inside connection, and the drawings don’t show a lock on it, so ask for one on the apartment side if the person living there keeps a different schedule.
The modern farmhouse with an in-law suite is another plan built for more than one generation. And if this were your house, who would live in the apartment? I’d love to hear in the comments.