Garage Bar Apartments

Garage Bar Apartments are four residential units above Grand Rapids Garage Bar & Grill at 819 Ottawa Avenue NW in the Monroe North District, completed in 2015 as part of a mixed-use redevelopment. Since the building opened, all four apartments have remained occupied — a quiet but telling indicator of the location’s strength and the residential program’s fit with the surrounding neighborhood.

The project pairs a popular ground-floor restaurant with a small, high-occupancy residential program directly above it — a building type the Monroe North District benefits from but does not have nearly enough of. Garage Bar Apartments is a representative example of Third Coast Development’s preferred small-format mixed-use approach: take a single building, do both halves of the program well, and let the result stand as evidence for what the rest of the corridor could become.