Building Our Guest House

August 14th, 2023

The Back Story, we purchased a property in Whitefish, MT on an idyllic 5 acres in May of 2022. The property was a one bedroom, complete fixer, with a detached garage. Here is the how and the why we converted our garage into a luxury two bedroom, 1 bath guest house.

Our garage was a 620 sq ft rectangle shell, initially we were going to make it a one bedroom space so it wouldn’t feel cramped but after turning to AirDNA for actual short term rental data for the area, we found for the 59937 zip code, the most sought after rental size was a 2 bedroom that could sleep a good amount of people. It was then we decided it had to be a two bedroom house.

After multiple revisions we had our layout nailed down (see below). We knew we needed to have full size bunkbeds, a sleeper sofa and an island that doubled as a dining table so that helped informed the layout. Since it will primarily be used as a short term rental, we forwent closets in the bedrooms, this allowed for more living space and a full size kitchen. The biggest hurdles were the utilities, which we ended up sticking in the attic, and a linen closet for our cleaning staff. The big advantage we had were our ten foot ceilings, high ceilings make any small space feel larger! Once we actually got furniture in the space things changed a little, but for the most part everything feels spacious enough and we have room to sleep 6!

From there we had to decide on our finishes (i.e. doors, windows, cabinets, flooring etc). A few factors played into our decision making process for this, we wanted it to match the main house aesthetically, so our cabinet and color palette was somewhat set from there. Being a design forward brand we wanted some standout details and luxury finishes and lastly we turned to AirDNA again to see how much we could charge for a luxury rental. As you can see below, the nightly rates dramatically increase for luxury rental properties in the area so we went for it!

The design features we were most excited about were the moody bedrooms with wood ceilings and our huge wood accent wall in the living room. We wanted to keep the living space bright and open but give it a little character. For a fresh, lived in feel we mixed new furniture with some vintage pieces. And of course we’ve always wanted a black house, so we went dark on the exterior too. Our goal someday is to reside the main house black as well!

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