For This Architect, the Garage Isn’t an Afterthought

When Patrick Ahearn was growing up in Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s, he became obsessed with cars. He knew every model down to its hub caps, which he would render in intricate drawings.

But a high-school guidance counsellor discouraged his dream of being a car designer, telling him he’d need to get an engineering degree, and suggested architecture instead.

Now, Mr. Ahearn, 71, is a nationally known architect, famous for his many hundreds of often large, New England style, classic houses that stylistically blend into the background on Martha’s Vineyard, Wellesley and up and down Cape Cod. His goal is to make the homes appear timeless and authentic, as if they have been there forever—to give them what he refers to as “implied history.”

His projects tend to look alike, and they are easily identifiable as his work. They often include large, luxurious car barns and carriage houses filled with vintage cars. Many of his clients are baby boomer men who share his automotive enthusiasm and become his friends.

“The garage has to be as nice as the rest of the house,” says David Malm, 57, managing partner of a private-equity firm, who has owned several homes and car barns designed by Mr. Ahearn. “You don’t want to go from a house with millwork and brick into a garage with slab concrete and plaster on the walls. It’s jarring,” Mr. Malm says.

Mr. Malm’s Ahearn-designed, stand-alone car barn on Martha’s Vineyard is on a property he bought for around $4 million in 2019. It has brick floors in a herringbone pattern, wood beams and a club-like area with leather chairs, a bar and a television and living spaces upstairs. He is currently renting it out, but usually he keeps his red 1971 MG there. He also has a carriage house in Dover, Mass., part of a $2 million home renovation and new garage project, where he keeps his three Aston Martins. “They’re such beautiful cars. You have to put them somewhere nice,” he says.

Mr. Ahearn says the lines of his garages, like many of the homes he designs, are inspired by classic cars, with roof overhangs that nod to streamlined headlights and windows with frames like the teeth of a 1960 Corvette’s grille. He is inspired by the simple, timeless designs and the time period they represent. “The world was a better place in the 1950s,” he says.

He matches the car a person drives to the project he designs for them, using it as part of the narrative, or script, he creates for how the person lives, which he says helps them pick appropriate fixtures and materials.

“I can tell a lot about a person by their car. Sometimes it determines whether I do their house or not,” says Mr. Ahearn, who has blue eyes, a thick moustache and wears button down shirts and blue blazers.

He tells of one client, the CEO of a major office supply company, who drove a beat-up Toyota Corolla. “That told me a lot about how cheap he was,” says Mr. Ahearn. Throughout the design process, the client was always questioning the cost of the materials and fixtures. “I had to educate him on why it’s not just a vanilla box,” he says.

He recently asked the client, did he still own the Corolla? He did. “He says he’s just not a car guy,” says Mr. Ahearn, throwing up his hands.

Chris Ruggles, 52, a retired software engineer who is a “car guy,” hired Mr. Ahearn to design a 1,200-square-foot carriage house in Wellesley. He knew about Mr. Ahearn’s affinity for cars because every carriage house he liked was designed by him. “He has an easily recognizable style,” says Mr. Ruggles.

The one Mr. Ahearn designed for Mr. Ruggles, for about $600,000, has brick floors, white beadboard walls, a high ceiling and leather chairs for hanging out. The exterior, with its dormers, shutters and shingled roof, makes it look like another house. The doors look like old fashioned carriage house doors but swing open automatically.

Mr. Ruggles likes to spend time sitting quietly in the carriage house, sometimes listening to music, just being around his Albert Blue 1970 Porsche 911E, his Signal Orange 1984 Porsche 911 RSR Tribute and his Old English White 1960 MGA Roadster.

“It’s a Zen thing. It’s relaxing,” he says. His wife, Christina Ruggles, has recently started having dinner parties in the garage among the cars with her friends. “It’s turned out to be a nice little event space,” he says.

The parties that Martha’s Vineyard real-estate broker and contractor Gerret Conover, 58, holds in his Ahearn-designed car barn in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard are wilder: he dresses up mannequins and seats them in his silver 1967 Chevrolet Corvette convertible and his Pearl White 1967 Pontiac GTO.

In Mr. Conover’s garage, which cost about $450,000 to build, the signature Ahearn brick floors accommodate a car lift, the cathedral ceiling houses a massive chandelier, and the walls—premium grade pine with eight coats of varnish—are crowded with what he calls “automobilia”: early to-Mid 20th Century enamel and neon service station signs and vintage calendars. An old Mobil gas station pump and a soda machine complete the look.

Mr. Ahearn’s own 2-acre compound in Wellesley has three separate garage spaces and centres around a 1936 farmhouse he bought for $525,000 in 1991 and renovated, adding two wings, all painted it in his signature Ahearn white (half Benjamin Moore Linen White, half Benjamin Moore China White).

In 2011 he bought an adjacent property for $825,000 and built two new garage spaces: A carriage house and a car barn, for a total of around $2 million. The carriage house’s old-fashioned looking Essex Green stable doors automatically swing open to reveal the four most-prized of his 18 cars (a number that’s always changing, as he buys and sells them): a 968 American Motors AMC AMX in Matador red, a 1956 Ford Thunderbird in peacock turquoise, a 1953 Studebaker Commander in regal red and a 1964 Studebaker Avanti in turquoise.

Mr. Ahearn’s car barn is 4,000-square-feet and has two-stories and a loft. The lower level is what he calls his sanctuary—where he works and hangs out, amid his 1958 365A Porsche Speedster in fjord green, his 1964 356 C Porsche coupe in dolphin grey and his 1970 280 SL Mercedes-Benz in beige grey. Three leather chairs, a big flat screen TV, an electric train set with a model Porsche dealership and dozens of little Porsche model cars, among a sea of other car memorabilia, set the mood.

The intersection of car design and architecture, sometimes dubbed “carchitecture,” goes back to when the first automobiles hit the road over a century ago, leaving a “lasting imprint on the design of our built environment,” according to the introduction to the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s current Automania exhibit. Le Corbusier compared car design to that of ancient Greek temples, while Frank Lloyd Wright, who was obsessed with cars and designing spaces for them, incorporated garages into signature homes like the Robie House in Chicago and Fallingwater outside Pittsburgh.

Nowadays, architects design condo buildings around cars, such as the Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., where each of the 60 units has built-in parking in the apartment, separated from the living area by a glass wall to allow views of the vehicles.

Born in 1950, Mr. Ahearn grew up in Levittown, the planned production home community on Long Island developed by William Levitt that was composed of nearly identical Cape Cod—and ranch-style houses created for GIs returning from war. It was to the suburb what the Model T is to the car, says Mr. Ahearn: a pioneer of mass-produced good design that changed society. He credits the community for influencing his designs by making him appreciate the balance between density and scale and that warmth can accompany sparseness.

After graduating in 1973 from Syracuse University with undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, the first in his family to attend college, Mr. Ahearn packed up his lime green VW Bus and headed to Boston, where a girlfriend was attending law school. He was hired at Architects Collaborative in Cambridge and Benjamin Thompson & Associates, where he worked on the adaptive reuse of Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

In 1978, he started his own practice, converting buildings to condos in Boston’s Back Bay and working on national and international hotel projects. He pivoted to renovating and building single family homes, expanding his now 21-person office to include Martha’s Vineyard in the 1990s, where he has designed hundreds of homes. His projects, ranging between $500,000 and $5 million, now span the country and Canada.

His second and current wife, Marsha Ahearn, had three young children when they met in 1987 and drove what Mr. Ahearn describes as an unremarkable blue Volvo station wagon. He married her anyway in 1989. “Í thought I could correct that,” he says.

Mrs. Ahearn doesn’t go into the garage spaces at her home in Wellesley very often. The series of 15 Chevrolet Suburbans she’s owned stay in the driveway. That is partly for convenience: Since the carriage house and the car barn aren’t connected to the house, they wouldn’t help protect her in rain and snow.

But it’s also that her cars just don’t fit. “I don’t get garage space,” she says

PARIS —Paris has long been a byword for luxurious living. The traditional components of the upscale home, from parquet floors to elaborate moldings, have their origins here. Yet settling down in just the right address in this low-rise, high-density city may be the greatest luxury of all.

Tradition reigns supreme in Paris real estate, where certain conditions seem set in stone—the western half of the city, on either side of the Seine, has long been more expensive than the east. But in the fashion world’s capital, parts of the housing market are also subject to shifting fads. In the trendy, hilly northeast, a roving cool factor can send prices in this year’s hip neighborhood rising, while last year’s might seem like a sudden bargain.

This week, with the opening of the Olympic Games and the eyes of the world turned toward Paris, The Wall Street Journal looks at the most expensive and desirable areas in the City of Light.

The Most Expensive Arrondissement: the 6th

Known for historic architecture, elegant apartment houses and bohemian street cred, the 6th Arrondissement is Paris’s answer to Manhattan’s West Village. Like its New York counterpart, the 6th’s starving-artist days are long behind it. But the charm that first wooed notable residents like Gertrude Stein and Jean-Paul Sartre is still largely intact, attracting high-minded tourists and deep-pocketed homeowners who can afford its once-edgy, now serene atmosphere.

Le Breton George V Notaires, a Paris notary with an international clientele, says the 6th consistently holds the title of most expensive arrondissement among Paris’s 20 administrative districts, and 2023 was no exception. Last year, average home prices reached $1,428 a square foot—almost 30% higher than the Paris average of $1,100 a square foot.

According to Meilleurs Agents, the Paris real estate appraisal company, the 6th is also home to three of the city’s five most expensive streets. Rue de Furstemberg, a secluded loop between Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine, comes in on top, with average prices of $2,454 a square foot as of March 2024.

For more than two decades, Kyle Branum, a 51-year-old attorney, and Kimberly Branum, a 60-year-old retired CEO, have been regular visitors to Paris, opting for apartment rentals and ultimately an ownership interest in an apartment in the city’s 7th Arrondissement, a sedate Left Bank district known for its discreet atmosphere and plutocratic residents.

“The 7th was the only place we stayed,” says Kimberly, “but we spent most of our time in the 6th.”

In 2022, inspired by the strength of the dollar, the Branums decided to fulfil a longstanding dream of buying in Paris. Working with Paris Property Group, they opted for a 1,465-square-foot, three-bedroom in a building dating to the 17th century on a side street in the 6th Arrondissement. They paid $2.7 million for the unit and then spent just over $1 million on the renovation, working with Franco-American visual artist Monte Laster, who also does interiors.

The couple, who live in Santa Barbara, Calif., plan to spend about three months a year in Paris, hosting children and grandchildren, and cooking after forays to local food markets. Their new kitchen, which includes a French stove from luxury appliance brand Lacanche, is Kimberly’s favourite room, she says.

Another American, investor Ashley Maddox, 49, is also considering relocating.

In 2012, the longtime Paris resident bought a dingy, overstuffed 1,765-square-foot apartment in the 6th and started from scratch. She paid $2.5 million and undertook a gut renovation and building improvements for about $800,000. A centrepiece of the home now is the one-time salon, which was turned into an open-plan kitchen and dining area where Maddox and her three children tend to hang out, American-style. Just outside her door are some of the city’s best-known bakeries and cheesemongers, and she is a short walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Left Bank’s premier green space.

“A lot of the majesty of the city is accessible from here,” she says. “It’s so central, it’s bananas.” Now that two of her children are going away to school, she has listed the four-bedroom apartment with Varenne for $5 million.

The Most Expensive Neighbourhoods: Notre-Dame and Invalides

Garrow Kedigian is moving up in the world of Parisian real estate by heading south of the Seine.

During the pandemic, the Canada-born, New York-based interior designer reassessed his life, he says, and decided “I’m not going to wait any longer to have a pied-à-terre in Paris.”

He originally selected a 1,130-square-foot one-bedroom in the trendy 9th Arrondissement, an up-and-coming Right Bank district just below Montmartre. But he soon realised it was too small for his extended stays, not to mention hosting guests from out of town.

After paying about $1.6 million in 2022 and then investing about $55,000 in new decor, he put the unit up for sale in early 2024 and went house-shopping a second time. He ended up in the Invalides quarter of the 7th Arrondissement in the shadow of one Paris’s signature monuments, the golden-domed Hôtel des Invalides, which dates to the 17th century and is fronted by a grand esplanade.

His new neighbourhood vies for Paris’s most expensive with the Notre-Dame quarter in the 4th Arrondissement, centred on a few islands in the Seine behind its namesake cathedral. According to Le Breton, home prices in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood were $1,818 a square foot in 2023, followed by $1,568 a square foot in Invalides.

After breaking even on his Right Bank one-bedroom, Kedigian paid $2.4 million for his new 1,450-square-foot two-bedroom in a late 19th-century building. It has southern exposures, rounded living-room windows and “gorgeous floors,” he says. Kedigian, who bought the new flat through Junot Fine Properties/Knight Frank, plans to spend up to $435,000 on a renovation that will involve restoring the original 12-foot ceiling height in many of the rooms, as well as rescuing the ceilings’ elaborate stucco detailing. He expects to finish in 2025.

Over in the Notre-Dame neighbourhood, Belles demeures de France/Christie’s recently sold a 2,370-square-foot, four-bedroom home for close to the asking price of about $8.6 million, or about $3,630 a square foot. Listing agent Marie-Hélène Lundgreen says this places the unit near the very top of Paris luxury real estate, where prime homes typically sell between $2,530 and $4,040 a square foot.

The Most Expensive Suburb: Neuilly-sur-Seine

The Boulevard Périphérique, the 22-mile ring road that surrounds Paris and its 20 arrondissements, was once a line in the sand for Parisians, who regarded the French capital’s numerous suburbs as something to drive through on their way to and from vacation. The past few decades have seen waves of gentrification beyond the city’s borders, upgrading humble or industrial districts to the north and east into prime residential areas. And it has turned Neuilly-sur-Seine, just northwest of the city, into a luxury compound of first resort.

In 2023, Neuilly’s average home price of $1,092 a square foot made the leafy, stately community Paris’s most expensive suburb.

Longtime residents, Alain and Michèle Bigio, decided this year is the right time to list their 7,730-square-foot, four-bedroom townhouse on a gated Neuilly street.

The couple, now in their mid 70s, completed the home in 1990, two years after they purchased a small parcel of garden from the owners next door for an undisclosed amount. Having relocated from a white-marble château outside Paris, the couple echoed their previous home by using white- and cream-coloured stone in the new four-story build. The Bigios, who will relocate just back over the border in the 16th Arrondissement, have listed the property with Emile Garcin Propriétés for $14.7 million.

The couple raised two adult children here and undertook upgrades in their empty-nester years—most recently, an indoor pool in the basement and a new elevator.

The cool, pale interiors give way to dark and sardonic images in the former staff’s quarters in the basement where Alain works on his hobby—surreal and satirical paintings, whose risqué content means that his wife prefers they stay downstairs. “I’m not a painter,” he says. “But I paint.”

The Trendiest Arrondissement: the 9th

French interior designer Julie Hamon is theatre royalty. Her grandfather was playwright Jean Anouilh, a giant of 20th-century French literature, and her sister is actress Gwendoline Hamon. The 52-year-old, who divides her time between Paris and the U.K., still remembers when the city’s 9th Arrondissement, where she and her husband bought their 1,885-square-foot duplex in 2017, was a place to have fun rather than put down roots. Now, the 9th is the place to do both.

The 9th, a largely 19th-century district, is Paris at its most urban. But what it lacks in parks and other green spaces, it makes up with nightlife and a bustling street life. Among Paris’s gentrifying districts, which have been transformed since 2000 from near-slums to the brink of luxury, the 9th has emerged as the clear winner. According to Le Breton, average 2023 home prices here were $1,062 a square foot, while its nearest competitors for the cool crown, the 10th and the 11th, have yet to break $1,011 a square foot.

A co-principal in the Bobo Design Studio, Hamon—whose gut renovation includes a dramatic skylight, a home cinema and air conditioning—still seems surprised at how far her arrondissement has come. “The 9th used to be well known for all the theatres, nightclubs and strip clubs,” she says. “But it was never a place where you wanted to live—now it’s the place to be.”

With their youngest child about to go to college, she and her husband, 52-year-old entrepreneur Guillaume Clignet, decided to list their Paris home for $3.45 million and live in London full-time. Propriétés Parisiennes/Sotheby’s is handling the listing, which has just gone into contract after about six months on the market.

The 9th’s music venues were a draw for 44-year-old American musician and piano dealer, Ronen Segev, who divides his time between Miami and a 1,725-square-foot, two-bedroom in the lower reaches of the arrondissement. Aided by Paris Property Group, Segev purchased the apartment at auction during the pandemic, sight unseen, for $1.69 million. He spent $270,000 on a renovation, knocking down a wall to make a larger salon suitable for home concerts.

During the Olympics, Segev is renting out the space for about $22,850 a week to attendees of the Games. Otherwise, he prefers longer-term sublets to visiting musicians for $32,700 a month.

Most Exclusive Address: Avenue Junot

Hidden in the hilly expanses of the 18th Arrondissement lies a legendary street that, for those in the know, is the city’s most exclusive address. Avenue Junot, a bucolic tree-lined lane, is a fairy-tale version of the city, separate from the gritty bustle that surrounds it.

Homes here rarely come up for sale, and, when they do, they tend to be off-market, or sold before they can be listed. Martine Kuperfis—whose Paris-based Junot Group real-estate company is named for the street—says the most expensive units here are penthouses with views over the whole of the city.

In 2021, her agency sold a 3,230-square-foot triplex apartment, with a 1,400-square-foot terrace, for $8.5 million. At about $2,630 a square foot, that is three times the current average price in the whole of the 18th.

Among its current Junot listings is a 1930s 1,220-square-foot townhouse on the avenue’s cobblestone extension, with an asking price of $2.8 million.