If you drive down a residential street and see a home with a double garage door, you will certainly expect to be able to pull into the driveway and park inside; however, a recent thread on Internet discussion site Reddit shows how real estate sales professionals can buck this architectural standard.
You know how some museums make you exit through the gift shop? Or how some airports are designed in such a way to make you walk past the cafes, delis and duty-free shops before boarding your flight?
It so happens that a planned neighborhood in South Carolina is using a similar sales technique to attract prospective home buyers. A photo accompanying the aforementioned Reddit thread shows a typical single-family home with some Mediterranean and English manor details, but what about the driveway? Instead of leading to the garage door for the convenience of residents, it end just outside the kitchen with no way to enter the house without having to walk around it, and this is exactly the intention of the real estate sales manager.
It turns out that the photo is of home being simultaneously used as a model and a sales office. House hunters who pull into the driveway can leave their cars parked outside and walk around towards the entrance, but they must first walk past the garage, which has been temporarily converted into a sales office.
In case the prospective home buyers are not interested in a new floor plan and insist on purchasing the model house, the developer can easily reconfigure the driveway so that it leads to the garage as it should; otherwise, it would not make architectural sense.