Two identical houses, four miles apart, can legally take completely different garage doors. That is not a quirk — it is written into the village codes, and on the North Shore the differences are large enough to change what you buy.
We get asked for "a standard 16x7" more often than any other size. In parts of Winnetka that door cannot legally face the street. In Kenilworth, on a corner lot, it may use up most of your allowance twice over. Two miles south in Evanston nobody caps the width, but a preservation commission may want a say in how it looks.
This is the article we wish existed when we started taking calls north of Wilmette. Every provision below is quoted from a published municipal source, and every one of them carries the same warning: codes change, and the village is the authority, not us. We are door installers. We are not lawyers or zoning consultants, and we do not pull your permits for you. Confirm the current text with the village before you order anything.
Winnetka: nine feet per front-facing door
Winnetka has the most specific garage-door provisions of any village on our list, and they sit in the village code at § 17.30.110. Per the published Winnetka village code:
- An individual garage door facing the front cannot exceed 9 feet wide.
- On interior lots, front-facing attached garages are limited to 22 feet total width.
- Front garage doors cannot exceed 33% of lot width, or 18 feet — whichever is smaller.
- Detached garages adjacent to alleys need no setback, provided eaves and gutters do not encroach into the alley.
- Detached garages are capped at 15 feet tall — 18 feet if the roof pitch matches the principal building — with a rear setback that can be as little as 2 feet.
The nine-foot rule is the headline. It is also why, if you drive Winnetka's front-loaded blocks, you see pairs of doors rather than one wide one. A front-facing two-car garage there is almost always two separate 8x7 or 9x7 doors, because a single 16x7 opening facing the street is not a legal front-facing configuration under a 9-foot-per-door cap.
Practically, two doors is a different job from one. You get two openers or one opener and a lot of manual lifting; two sets of springs, cables and drums to maintain; a centre post between the openings that has to be structurally sound and that permanently limits how wide a vehicle you can park. It is not worse — plenty of people prefer the look, and one failed spring only takes half your garage out of service — but it is a different maintenance picture, and it should be priced as two doors from the start.
Front is not the same as rear
Notice how the Winnetka provisions loosen at the back of the lot. The width caps are written around front-facing doors, while alley-adjacent detached garages are given no setback requirement at all so long as the eaves stay clear of the alley. In East Winnetka, where the older alley-loaded stock is, the constraint on your door is usually the physical opening, not a width cap. Confirm which category your garage falls into with the village before you order.
Kenilworth: twenty feet total, per street
Kenilworth is a 0.61 square mile village of about 2,500 people, and its garage rule is short and blunt. Per the Kenilworth village code at § 153.080: no garage shall have door openings facing the lot line abutting any adjacent street where the sum of the garage door openings exceeds 20 feet. No garage may sit closer to the front lot line than the principal building setback.
Read the wording carefully, because two words in it do most of the work.
"Sum" means the cap is on total opening, not on each door. Twenty feet buys you one 16x7 double with room to spare, or two 9-foot singles with two feet left over, or two 8-foot singles comfortably. It does not buy you a 16-foot double plus a 9-foot single on the same street elevation.
"Any adjacent street" is the one that catches corner lots. On a corner, you have two street-abutting lot lines, and the test applies to each of them independently. A garage with doors facing two streets has to satisfy the 20-foot sum in both directions. That is a real design constraint on a courtyard or side-load layout, and it is worth resolving on paper before anyone measures for a door.
There is a second Kenilworth fact that determines the whole market there. The village was platted in 1889 by Joseph Sears, and one of the recorded planning principles was no alleys. The consequence is physical and permanent: Kenilworth has essentially no alley-loaded garage stock. Every garage is reached from the street by a driveway — attached, or detached and set back on the lot. If you have worked in Evanston, that takes some adjusting to. There is no back way in, so access, drive protection and where a service van parks all become the homeowner's driveway problem rather than the alley's.
The founding principles as recorded also included an explicitly racially exclusionary sales covenant. That is documented history and it is a reason we talk about Kenilworth's plat in terms of its physical planning, not its "vision."
Evanston: no width cap, but a review question
Evanston does not cap garage door width the way Winnetka and Kenilworth do. What it has instead is an accessory-structure rulebook and a preservation process.
From the R1–R3 residential district regulations, a detached garage takes a 3-foot minimum rear setback and a 5-foot minimum interior side setback, with height capped at 14½ feet for flat and mansard roofs and 20 feet grade-to-peak for everything else. It cannot sit closer to the front or street-side lot line than the house.
Then the preservation layer. On a landmark property or in a historic district, a Certificate of Appropriateness is required for exterior work that requires a permit and "can be seen from the public way (city street, alley, public sidewalk, or other space permanently appropriated for use by the public)." The alley is inside that definition. So in Evanston the relaxed side of the lot in Winnetka's code is the tightened side — the rear elevation is the one that may attract review. We wrote that up in full in our guide to Evanston permits and historic review, including the honest caveat that the City's page does not name garage doors specifically.
One more Evanston caveat, and it applies to every number in this section: Council adopted the Envision Evanston 2045 comprehensive plan in January 2026, with a full zoning-code rewrite being scoped through mid-2026 as a 15 to 24 month process. Re-check anything before you build to it.
Rogers Park and Edgewater: the 600 square foot programme
Cross Howard Street and the rules change again, because you are in Chicago.
The City runs a streamlined permit programme for detached frame garages. Per the City of Chicago's garage permit guidance, it covers frame garages up to 600 square feet, and it requires a survey for lots without alley access — which tells you plainly what the default assumption is in Rogers Park and Edgewater. Alley access is the norm; the absence of it is the exception that needs paperwork.
The programme excludes masonry garages, attached garages, heated or plumbed structures, and anything with a loft. Those are still buildable — they just fall outside the simplified route.
Six hundred square feet is roughly 20x22 up to 24x24, which is a two-car garage. In practice that carries one 16x7 double or two 8x7 or 9x7 singles, and on the 1920s stock you will find narrow openings and very little headroom, which is a low-headroom track conversation rather than a code conversation.
Where we do not have an answer: Glencoe
Honesty is more useful than a confident guess.
We were not able to retrieve Glencoe's specific garage provisions from the village code. Given that its immediate neighbours cap things — Winnetka at 9 feet per front-facing door, Kenilworth at 20 feet of total street-facing opening — it would be unwise to assume Glencoe has nothing comparable. Check the Village of Glencoe before specifying a door width there, particularly on the architect-designed stock around the ravines where custom widths are common anyway.
Skokie sits at the other end of the spectrum. We have no door-width provision to quote, but the village runs a public alley grading programme, which the village's own alley grading page documents — alleys there are a standard, maintained feature. That means the eastern and southern bungalow blocks nearest Evanston behave like Evanston: detached garages at the rear lot line, single openings, alley approach. Wilmette splits the difference, with pre-war alley stock east of Ridge and post-war driveway-loaded subdivisions west of it.
The comparison, in one place
| Town | What the published source says | What it means when you order |
|---|---|---|
| Winnetka | Code § 17.30.110: individual front-facing door max 9 ft wide; front-facing attached garages on interior lots max 22 ft total; front doors ≤33% of lot width or 18 ft, whichever is smaller; alley-adjacent detached garages need no setback if eaves stay clear; detached garages max 15 ft tall (18 ft matching principal pitch), rear setback as little as 2 ft | Front-loaded two-car garages are two doors, not one. Price two sets of springs, cables and rollers, and check the centre post. Alley-facing garages are far less constrained. |
| Kenilworth | Code § 153.080: no garage may have door openings facing the lot line abutting any adjacent street where the sum of openings exceeds 20 ft; no garage closer to the front lot line than the principal building setback. Village platted 1889 with no alleys. | 20 ft total per street elevation. Corner lots must satisfy it in both directions. No alley stock at all, so everything is driveway access. |
| Evanston | R1–R3 accessory structure rules: 3 ft rear, 5 ft interior side, 14½ ft flat/mansard, 20 ft grade-to-peak otherwise. Certificate of Appropriateness for permitted exterior work visible from the public way on landmark and district properties — the alley is a public way. | No width cap, but appearance may be reviewed on a designated property. Three feet of rear setback means very little working room on an alley. |
| Rogers Park / Edgewater | Chicago detached frame garage permit programme: frame garages up to 600 sq ft; survey required for lots without alley access; excludes masonry, attached, heated or plumbed, and lofted structures. | Two-car frame garage on the alley is the assumed pattern. Expect narrow openings and low headroom on 1920s stock. |
| Glencoe | Not retrieved. We could not obtain Glencoe's specific garage provisions. | Do not assume there is no cap. Check the village code before specifying width. |
| Skokie | No door-width provision to quote. Village operates a public alley grading programme, so alleys are a standard maintained feature. | Eastern and southern bungalow blocks behave like Evanston: detached, alley-loaded, single openings. |
Confirm every line of that table with the relevant village or city. It was accurate to the published sources when we compiled it, and municipal codes are amended without telling door installers.
What this actually means when you are buying
Five things to settle before you get a quote
- Which elevation does the door face? Front, side street, or alley. In Winnetka that determines whether a width cap applies at all. In Evanston it determines whether preservation review may.
- Is the lot a corner? In Kenilworth, a corner lot has two street-abutting lot lines, and the 20-foot sum has to work on both.
- One door or two? If the code pushes you to two, say so up front. Two 9x7 doors and one 18-foot opening are entirely different builds, and a quote written for the wrong one is worthless.
- What is the lot width? Winnetka's 33%-of-lot-width test means a narrow lot can be more restrictive than the flat 18-foot figure suggests.
- Have you called the village? Every one of these provisions is published, and every one of them can be confirmed in a single phone call to the building or community development desk.
The pattern across all of it is simple enough to hold in your head. North of Wilmette, the rules are about how wide a garage door may be and how it faces the street. In Evanston and the Chicago neighbourhoods to the south, the rules are about permits, alleys and — on designated properties — appearance. Winnetka relaxes at the alley; Evanston tightens there.
What we can and cannot help with
We measure openings, quote doors, and install them. We can tell you whether two 9x7 doors will physically work in your opening, what a centre post has to carry, whether an existing header can take a wider door, and what the installation actually involves on a garage built in 1925. We carry common parts on the van and we will tell you when repair beats replacement.
What we will not do is tell you your job is compliant. That is the village's call, it is free to ask, and getting it wrong after the door is manufactured is expensive in a way that a phone call is not.
If you want to talk through residential door options for a specific opening, call (224) 505-2236. Bring the width, the height, the headroom above the opening, and which way the door faces. That last one turns out to matter more on the North Shore than anywhere else we work.
Frequently asked questions
Can I put a 16x7 double door on the front of a Winnetka house?
Not as a single front-facing opening, on the code as published. Winnetka village code § 17.30.110 limits an individual garage door facing the front to 9 feet wide, with front-facing attached garages on interior lots capped at 22 feet total and front doors limited to 33% of lot width or 18 feet, whichever is smaller. That is why front-loaded two-car garages there are typically two separate 8x7 or 9x7 doors. An alley-facing detached garage is treated differently. Confirm the current text with the Village of Winnetka before you order — codes change.
How does the Kenilworth 20-foot rule work on a corner lot?
It applies to each street separately. The code says no garage shall have door openings facing the lot line abutting any adjacent street where the sum of the openings exceeds 20 feet. A corner lot has two street-abutting lot lines, so a garage with doors facing both has to satisfy the 20-foot sum in each direction independently. Note also that it is a sum, not a per-door limit — 20 feet total, however you divide it. Confirm the current provision with the Village of Kenilworth before you commit to a layout.
Why does Kenilworth have no alley garages?
Because the village was platted in 1889 by Joseph Sears with no alleys as an explicit planning principle, and that plat is still the village. The consequence is that essentially every Kenilworth garage is reached from the street by a driveway, either attached or detached and set back on the lot. For us that changes the job in practical ways: no rear access, the van works from the driveway, and drive protection matters. It is the opposite of Evanston, where the alley is the default approach to most detached garages.
Does Evanston limit how wide a garage door can be?
Not in the way Winnetka and Kenilworth do. Evanston's residential district regulations set accessory-structure limits — 3 feet minimum rear setback, 5 feet minimum interior side, 14½ feet height for flat and mansard roofs and 20 feet grade-to-peak otherwise — rather than a door width cap. What Evanston adds instead is preservation review: on a landmark property or in a historic district, permitted exterior work visible from the public way can require a Certificate of Appropriateness, and the alley counts as a public way. Confirm both with the City.
What about Glencoe?
We could not retrieve Glencoe's specific garage provisions, so we are not going to invent them. Given that Winnetka caps front-facing doors at 9 feet and Kenilworth caps street-facing openings at 20 feet total, it would be a poor assumption that Glencoe has nothing comparable. Check the village code or call the Village of Glencoe before specifying a door width there. Much of the Glencoe stock is architect-designed with non-standard openings anyway, so a measured survey is the right first step regardless of what the code says.
Do you handle the permit or the village approval for me?
No. We measure, quote, supply and install doors, and we will tell you honestly when a repair beats a replacement. We are not lawyers, zoning consultants or permit expeditors, and we will not tell you a job is compliant. Every provision in this article is published by the village or city concerned and can be confirmed with one call to the building or community development desk. Make that call before the door is manufactured, because a custom door built to the wrong specification is not a returnable item.
Chris Duvall
Chris came to the residential side after ten years of commercial overhead doors, parking-deck sectionals and gate operators. He co-founded Evanston Garage Door Repair Guys with Nate Sorensen in 2011 and reads village codes so homeowners do not have to.