The slope, and the garage cut into it
City Bowl garages are unlike any others in Cape Town because the ground is not flat. A garage in Oranjezicht or Vredehoek is cut into the slope, with a metre of headroom on one side of the opening and almost none on the other, a lintel that is doing structural work, and a driveway that falls steeply to the street. The standard door does not fit the standard way, and a measuring visit here takes longer because the numbers matter more.
Low headroom is the recurring constraint, and it decides the door type more often than preference does. A sectional needs space above the opening for its tracks; where there is none, a roll-up that coils into a barrel is the answer, and where even that will not fit, a tip-up needs nothing above the opening at all — provided the driveway has room for it to swing.
Heritage houses, and the doors that suit them
Tamboerskloof, Gardens and the streets of Bo-Kaap are old enough that a bare steel sectional looks wrong on the front of the house, and in several of them the heritage overlay has a view on what goes in. Timber tip-ups, or steel doors with a timber-effect finish, are the usual answer, and a like-for-like replacement of a rotted timber door is one of the commonest installation jobs in the Bowl. Where the old door is sound, it is kept and automated in place.
The city centre and the Foreshore are a different world: apartment-block basements with roller shutters and commercial-grade doors on a body corporate's maintenance list, where the call comes from the managing agent and the job is scheduled around residents' cars.
Wind, and the door that faces it
The south-easter comes over the Bowl hard, and a garage door that faces it takes a load a suburban door never does. Sectional panels rattle and stress their hinges; tip-ups catch the wind on the swing and strain their arms. On the exposed streets of Higgovale and upper Vredehoek a roll-up in its guides handles it better than either, and a sectional that is fitted here gets its hinges and track brackets checked more often than one in the Southern Suburbs would.
Everything from Devil's Peak Estate down through Woodstock and Observatory is worked from the same routes, and the vans carry the low-headroom track kits and the timber-door hardware the Bowl keeps asking for.