If you’re thinking about Space Invaders right now, you probably spent a lot of time exchanging $5 bills for 20 quarters in the arcades of the early 1980s. But according to homeowner Eugene Popov, the inspiration for this colourful garage door wasn’t a youth spent feeding coins into game consoles; it was a few years living in South Africa.
He took the motif from the Ndebele people of northern South Africa, who are renowned for their distinctive traditional house painting with repeating geometric patterns and bright colours. After coming to Toronto, Popov wanted a little something to remind him of his former home. So why did he choose the garage door as the canvas for his remembrance? “I had a rusty garage door,” he explained, “and wanted to do something different.”
I’m still trying to figure out how I cycled and walked past this for two years before noticing it last weekend.
A version of this article originally appeared on Torontoist.