HE LIVES OUT BACK; avid canadian car trader revels in the hunt.(Revs)

Byline: Phil Berg

I'd live in here if my wife would let me,'' most readers with special garages tell us. Peter Klutt, co-host of the television show Dream Car Garage, found a unique way to solve this marital issue. If you peek behind his massive 50,000-square-foot garage complex, you'll see what looks like the beginnings of a nicely landscaped subdivision. It's Klutt's home, the sole residential structure in a newly expanding industrial suburb of Toronto. The spacious neo-eclectic home is a mere 50 yards behind the complex containing Klutt's restoration, fabrication, race and assembly shops, as well as the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame, offices for NASCAR Canada, winter storage for about two dozen of Klutt's friends' classics and a small TV studio. The front of the building is a two-story glass showroom, although Klutt admits that only about 20 customers walk through the doors of the six-year-old facility each year.

The 60-some cars inside are a mix of Klutt's personal classics, those he is restoring for customers and those for sale by his company, Legendary Motorcar Co. Even though the restoration, fabrication and race shops take up the bulk of the space, most of Klutt's business is buying and selling finished cars over the phone, specifically rare Shelby Cobras and Mustangs, Detroit muscle cars and Corvettes and Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari coupes. One of the cars belongs to a miner from western Canada who bought a Hemi Barracuda ragtop 24 years ago, when he was just 22 years old. He'd promised himself that he'd keep the car until he was 50, which will be four years from now. "We ended up doing a restoration for him, and I asked him what he was going to do with the car,'' recalls Klutt. "He asked, `Can I leave it here? ...