7 Things to Decide Before Designing Your Hangar

There is a very tempting way to begin designing a hangar: start collecting inspiration.

You save the hangar with the incredible pilot lounge. Someone sends you a photo of a bar they love. You see a golf simulator that would be perfect for Saturday afternoons. Maybe you want an office overlooking the airplane, a huge television for game days, or enough entertaining space for everyone who inevitably wanders over when the hangar door is open.

Those ideas are part of what makes designing a hangar so much fun, but they aren't where I want to start.

Before we decide where the lounge goes or what the cabinetry looks like, I want to understand how you actually use aviation. What do you fly? How much time do you spend at the hangar when you aren't flying? Who spends time there with you? Do you work there, entertain there, or disappear there for an entire Saturday? What are you storing? And what do you realistically see your aviation life looking like ten years from now?

Those answers should determine the floor plan not the other way around.

A thoughtfully designed hangar isn't simply a collection of impressive amenities surrounding an airplane. It's a highly personal space designed around the way you fly, work, entertain, and spend your time.

If you're beginning to plan your hangar, these are seven decisions worth making before the floor plan starts feeling permanent.

1. What Airplane Are We Designing Around Now and Later?

The airplane has to be one of our first conversations.

We need to understand what you're flying today, including wingspan, overall length, tail height, door clearance, and the amount of space you need to comfortably maneuver around it. We also need to account for everything else sharing the hangar floor: a tug, tools, motorcycles, golf carts, recreational equipment, or perhaps another airplane.

Then I want to know what you might realistically fly next.

Pilots upgrade. Missions change. Families add airplanes. Someone flying a smaller piston airplane today may already know that something larger is eventually in the plan. You don't need to dramatically oversize a hangar for every airplane you could theoretically own, but we should understand the direction you're headed before permanent walls, plumbing, cabinetry, stairs, and finished spaces begin consuming valuable hangar space.

This is especially important when we're designing a property you intend to keep for decades. Your current airplane may change long before the building does.

Future planning is less about predicting exactly what you'll own and more about preserving enough flexibility that the hangar can continue supporting the way you fly.

2. How Do You Actually Use Your Hangar?

Two pilots can own the exact same airplane and need completely different hangars.

One may arrive, preflight, fly, put the airplane away, and head home. Another may spend most Saturdays at the airport. The hangar door stays open, friends stop by, there's a game playing on television, someone orders lunch, and a quick morning flight somehow turns into an entire afternoon.

Someone else may run a business from the hangar and need a legitimate office environment. Another family may use the space as an extension of their home, especially during fly-ins and community events.

This is why I don't believe a hangar floor plan should begin with a standard checklist of rooms. Before we add finished square footage, we need to establish what the hangar actually represents in your life.

Is it primarily operational? Is it your weekend retreat? Is it where your aviation community gathers? Is it an extension of your home? Is it part workspace, part hangout, and part garage?

Once we understand the rhythm of your normal week at the airport, it becomes much easier to determine what the hangar genuinely needs.

3. How Do You Really Entertain?

One of my favorite things about the aviation community is that entertaining isn't always planned.

An open hangar door has a way of becoming an invitation. Someone taxis by, a neighbor stops in, another friend wanders over, and suddenly there are six people talking about airplanes when you had absolutely no intention of hosting anyone.

For some owners, that's the extent of entertaining at the hangar. They need comfortable seating, a television, cold drinks, and somewhere to put food when friends stop by. Other owners regularly host fly-ins, watch parties, client events, family gatherings, or dinners where the hangar itself becomes part of the experience.

Those situations require very different design decisions.

If larger-scale entertaining is part of your lifestyle, we may need to think about refrigeration, ice, food preparation, serving space, additional seating, restrooms, acoustics, television placement, outdoor connections, and how guests move through the space without interfering with the airplane.

This is also why I don't automatically assume every luxury hangar needs a full kitchen or elaborate bar. If you're never going to cook there, dedicating significant square footage to a residential-scale kitchen may not make sense. A beautifully designed beverage area, great refrigeration, an ice maker, and plenty of serving space might serve you far better.

The goal isn't to fit every possible amenity into the hangar. It's to invest in the amenities that make the way you already live better.

4. Will You Actually Work From the Hangar?

A place to check the weather and file a flight plan is very different from an office where you'll spend several hours a day.

If you're occasionally answering an email, checking weather, planning a flight, or looking something up before departure, you may only need a thoughtfully designed flight-planning station. That can often be incorporated into cabinetry or another finished area without dedicating an entire room to it.

If you regularly work from the hangar, we need to think much more carefully about what that means.

Do you take calls? Do you need multiple monitors? Will clients or employees visit? Do you need acoustic privacy? Should someone be able to reach your office without walking through the main hangar? Do you want to look up from your desk and see your airplane?

That last question is especially interesting from a design perspective. An office overlooking the hangar can create an incredible visual connection, but the glass, acoustics, lighting, privacy, and location all need to work together. A beautiful office that makes conference calls impossible every time something is happening in the hangar isn't a successful design.

We don't need to create a dedicated room for every activity. We need to understand the activities that happen repeatedly and make those easier.

5. What Are You Going to Store?

An empty hangar can give you a false sense of security.

It looks enormous until life moves in.

Flight bags, headsets, tools, oil, airplane cleaning products, covers, spare parts, luggage, bicycles, golf carts, motorcycles, coolers, folding chairs, seasonal items, recreational equipment, and household overflow can consume space surprisingly quickly.

That's why storage needs to be part of hangar planning from the beginning rather than something we solve with a few cabinets after everything else is finished.

I want to know what you're storing, how frequently you use it, whether it needs to be secured or climate controlled, and where you naturally need access to it. Flight bags and headsets might need a dedicated charging and drop zone. Tools and airplane supplies should be positioned around the way you work on the hangar floor. Entertaining supplies belong closer to the lounge or kitchen area instead of across the building.

Thoughtful storage doesn't mean covering every wall with cabinetry. In fact, I usually don't want to do that. It means creating logical places for the things you actually own so they don't slowly take over the hangar.

The goal is to keep the space working for you rather than eventually becoming a very expensive storage unit with an airplane squeezed into the middle.

6. Which Living Amenities Will You Genuinely Use?

This is usually where the wish list gets ambitious.

A pilot lounge. Full kitchen. Bar. Golf simulator. Gym. Theater. Guest suite. Shower. Office. Game room. Maybe even a wine room.

Could we design all of those things? Absolutely. The better question is whether you will use them enough to justify the square footage, infrastructure, and investment they require.

I'd rather create an exceptional lounge that you use every weekend than five amenity spaces that sounded exciting during planning but sit mostly untouched. If your family spends long days at the airport, perhaps a comfortable living area, bathroom, shower, and kitchenette would genuinely change how you use the hangar. If you're an avid golfer, the simulator may become one of the most-used spaces in the building. If entertaining is a major part of your aviation lifestyle, a proper bar and food-preparation area could be worth every inch.

This is where good hangar design requires some discipline. More rooms don't automatically create a more luxurious space. Sometimes they simply create more rooms to maintain.

Luxury, to me, is when the space anticipates what you need without giving you a building full of things you don't.

7. What Do You Want Your Hangar to Feel Like?

Once we've worked through function, we can start talking about something less measurable but equally important: how you want the hangar to feel.

Some pilots want the airplane to remain the unmistakable hero of the space. They love exposed structure, steel, polished concrete, darker finishes, and an environment that still feels connected to aviation even in the finished areas.

Others want the lounge or office to feel more like a retreat. They want warmth, comfortable furniture, beautiful materials, architectural lighting, and a distinctly residential feeling once they step away from the hangar floor.

Most projects land somewhere in between.

There isn't one aesthetic that makes a hangar look sophisticated, and we don't need to cover every wall in airplane memorabilia to establish where we are. The airplane itself already gives us an extraordinary focal point.

Instead, I want the finished spaces to feel like the owner. That might mean white oak against blackened steel, tailored leather furniture, natural stone, warm lighting, large-scale artwork, or a completely different material story that reflects the architecture and the people using it.

Once we understand what the hangar needs to do, we can create an environment that feels intentional rather than decorated.

Your Hangar Floor Plan Shouldn't Start With a List of Rooms

When someone tells me they want a lounge, office, kitchen, bathroom, and golf simulator in their hangar, those are useful pieces of information. But they're not enough to create the floor plan.

I want to understand why you need those spaces, how frequently you'll use them, who will use them with you, and how they need to relate to the airplane and the rest of the hangar.

That's why I believe good hangar planning begins with programming before amenities.

We start with the airplane and reasonable future possibilities. Then we look at how you spend time at the hangar, how you entertain, whether you work there, what you need to store, which amenities genuinely support your lifestyle, and what you want the finished environment to feel like. Only after those questions are answered should the floor plan begin taking shape.

The result is very different from designing a big metal building and figuring out where we can squeeze in a nice lounge afterward. The operational and finished spaces become part of the same design conversation from the beginning.

When Should You Bring a Designer Into Your Hangar Project?

Earlier than most people think.

You don't need to wait until the building is designed and someone asks you to start choosing flooring, cabinetry, lighting, or furniture. By that point, some of the decisions that could have had the greatest impact on the finished space may already be expensive or impossible to change.

Bringing a designer into the planning phase allows us to evaluate how much finished space you actually need, how those areas should relate to the airplane, where plumbing and electrical infrastructure belong, how lighting should function, what furniture clearances need to be protected, and how the hangar should support the way you intend to use it.

It also allows the architect, builder, and designer to coordinate those decisions instead of each person trying to work around choices that were made before they joined the project.

This is especially valuable if your hangar is part of an aviation residence or hangar home. The hangar and house shouldn't be designed as two completely separate worlds and connected at the end. How you arrive home after a flight, where gear and luggage go, how much of the airplane you see from the house, and how the hangar participates in entertaining are all part of the same lifestyle.

Those relationships are much easier to design intentionally at the beginning.

Planning a Hangar? Start With How You Fly.

The best hangars aren't defined by how many amenities they contain. They're defined by how naturally they support the people who use them.

Before deciding where the bar goes, think about what happens on a normal Saturday. Before building the office, decide how often you'll actually work there. Before dedicating valuable square footage to a lounge, think about who will use it and what happens when they do. And before designing every inch around the airplane you own today, consider where your aviation life might take you next.

These aren't necessarily the exciting decisions you'll save to a Pinterest board, but they're the decisions that make everything you choose afterward work better.

At Aeroview Design Co., we help pilots and aviation families plan hangars, hangar homes, and aviation residences around the way they actually fly, live, work, and entertain. The goal isn't simply to make the finished space beautiful. It's to make sure the right questions were answered before it ever became a finished space.

Planning a hangar or hangar home? Explore Aeroview's hangar planning and interior design services or schedule a consultation to start your project with the right questions.