How They Pulled It Off: A Greenhouse on Top of a Former Garage

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

When Karrie Nesbit and her husband Gordon were looking for a plot of land to build on, they wanted no more than an acre. The couple had been living on pristine Lake Lemon in southern Indiana but had little room to spread out. "The houses there were on top of each other, and the area had significant building restrictions," says Nesbit. "We were looking for a little land where we could put in a garden and have a garage for storage."

They stumbled across a property of 97 acres, partially classified as forest and wildlands. On a lark, they went to see it, spending five minutes in the original old house, built in 1986 and falling apart, and about two hours exploring the grounds. Their builder, Loren Wood, told them that repairing the derelict building wouldn’t be worth the cost—it’d be better just to tear the old house down. Midway through the demo in 2021, the couple had a lightbulb moment: why not keep the bottom portion and erect a greenhouse on top?

Project designers Russ Herndon and Allyn Lambert created the 20x24 glass greenhouse topper using a black steel frame and tempered, low-emissivity glass. The space below the greenhouse, lovingly dubbed "the bunker" by the Nesbits, has a kitchen and living quarters that serve as a small guest house. This space had once been the basement of the original dwelling and had been surrounded by hillside to make an earth berm-style structure. As it had originally been built into the ground, this space remains cool even when the greenhouse is 120 degrees. Automated fans kick in when the greenhouse is above 90 degrees, and the heaters turn on when it’s below 50 degrees.