Previously, unless you lived in a very cold climate or were quite wealthy, you did not have a garage and hence, no garage door. These days the person without a garage feels like the odd one out. Any street that you drive down, be it in South Africa or Denmark, is flanked on both sides by an endless line of garage doors. This is, unfortunately, a sign of the times. What started out, maybe, as a bit of a middle class status symbol has become a security necessity.
People being the creatures that they are: never satisfied for very long with the status quo. The garage door has reflected this. There are now so many variations on the garage door that everyone is spoilt for choice. Designs of garage doors were governed, in the early years, by the: form follows function principle; garage doors were there to protect your vehicle from inclement weather and thieves; as a result the early garage doors were quite plain and ordinary. Most were made from wood and opened up with a very basic upwardly moving hinge.
Those days are gone. Garage doors are now things of design beauty. No longer do you have to be satisfied with a boring single wooden door. Now you can have ornately decorated wooden or metal doors (that look like wood) that match and complement the rest of your home. The single hinge has now been replaced by electrically controlled rolling doors.
So once again the garage door has become a status symbol. People say that they need the garage door to be powered for security reasons, but we all know that the real reason is we have watched too many movies and it feels cool to sit in your car and open your garage. For years, people were content to get out of their cars and open the door, now suddenly the manually opened garage door has become a relic of the past.
Let us not forget the, now common place, double garage door that has separate controls, because why would someone want both doors to open at once, that would just be wasteful.
