The garage door which adorns every garage in the burbs in South Africa is as much of a status symbol as the fake Rolex that was doing the rounds in South Africa a few years ago. This statement is verified when one looks at type weather in South Africa. Garages and garage doors are for people who live in much colder places, places where the fuel could freeze in the pipes, and this is why they keep their cars in garages, which obviously need doors.
The garage door as we know it today has come through quite a few changes since the efforts garage door was seen on some or other TV show. People need to remember that that garage door is relatively young when you look at its history in South African suburbs. People in the burbs did not need garage doors because they did not need garages. Every house used to have one or more carports for the parking of their cars and this sufficed for ages.
If they felt they needed an enclosed area to do some work on the car then they would take a drive to their friends place and use his/her garage. This friend would always be someone who really needed to work behind closed doors because of the nature of their work, not because if some misguided sense of security.
All it took was one or two neighbours to get garages with their fancy doors, before all the homes in the burbs suddenly had to have them. If your drive was unadorned with the necessary doors then you may as well have driven your car into your mate’s garage and never come out. So obsessive did people become about the status attached to garage doors that even if they only had one car they would still get a garage which came with two doors, just like in the movies, so that every person would drove by their home would undoubtedly think that they were a two car famously, south Africans were so eager to fulfil this Hollywood idea of what makes a home, that they lost all reason.
