A building equipped with a terrace, skylights and folding glass doors is not a garage.
the essentials in brief
- The client referred to the spacing rules that are no longer applicable for the garage.
Such a structure does not represent a garage in terms of its structural design, but serves the residence of people, as the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main (OLG) ruled in a judgment published on Wednesday. Therefore the usual distance rules to the neighboring property according to the Hessian building regulations apply.
The parties to the dispute are neighbors. After the defendant obtained a permit in 2017 to renovate a garage that was already on his property, he had it demolished and began building the new one. The plaintiff fought against this unsuccessfully with an urgent procedure. The defendant completed the new garage building.
The plaintiff said that the newly constructed building was not a privileged garage according to the Hessian building regulations, for which no distance rules to the neighboring property apply. She therefore asked for the building to be removed, or, alternatively, to partially dismantle it. However, the regional court rejected both the application for removal and the alternative application.
On the other hand, the plaintiff appealed to the OLG – with success. The defendant had to remove the structure, the court ruled. He is violating the building code regulations on the limit distance to be observed. The erected building does not keep the required distances of at least three meters to the property line of the plaintiff.
Compliance with these spacing areas is also not dispensable. Because the building that has been erected does not represent “a privileged construction project”, in particular no so-called border garage. Rather, the structural design speaks in favor of a different use of the building for people to stay in.
The building is provided with an integrated terrace, light domes in the ceiling and a folding glass door that extends over the entire front. Lounges and terraces that are equivalent to them, however, are not components that are required for the storage of motor vehicles in the sense of a garage. The decision is not final, an appeal before the Federal Court of Justice is possible.
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