Garages added afterwards
Gardens was built before garages, and most of its garages were cut in later into whatever space the house had — a converted ground-floor room, a gap between the house and the wall, a space under a raised stoep. The openings are odd sizes with almost no headroom and no room for a tip-up to swing, and the door that fits is usually a roll-up coiling into a barrel. Where a timber tip-up was fitted and the driveway has the swing, it is kept and automated in place; where the frame has gone, a like-for-like timber replacement is made to the opening.
Heritage, and the street
Gardens sits under a heritage overlay in places, and a bare steel sectional on the front of a Victorian house is the wrong door. The other Gardens problem is the street: driveways that open straight onto Kloof Street or Mill Street with cars parked hard against them, so a door stuck open at night is an emergency with the house exposed to the busiest street in the Bowl.
Getting here
Gardens is minutes from everything and among the fastest addresses in the city, though parking the van on Kloof Street at night is its own problem. Oranjezicht, Tamboerskloof and Vredehoek share the routes.