Motorhomes
« Previous EntriesGRENOBLE TO GAP
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
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I have had a wonderful September. Tuscany (Lucca) at the beginning, Barcelona at the end and a wonderful tour round Provence in the middle. The drive from Grenoble to Gap was stunning and world famous. Never to be forgotten in my fabulous Rapido 703F motor home (campervan). And in Beaune Le Restaurant Du Grand Balcon was outstanding.
Christopher Macgowan
The viaduct at Millau.
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
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The viaduct at Millau on the A75 between Paris and Barcelona is something else. Designed by Norman Foster it is beautiful, graceful and breathtaking.
Christopher Macgowan
The new motorhome in my life…..
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
My new motorhome is a Trigano Tribute 650 which will take me into the smallest villages and the narrowest roads yet has all the luxury of a larger unit – but packed into a 6 metre length unit. The open road beckons!!
Christopher Macgowan
A resurgent piece of wheel estate.
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
By Simon Busch of The Financial Times.
When I think of caravans now, I unavoidably recall a scene from the 2002 Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt where Nicholson, recently shorn of unmourned wife, arrives for dinner at the mobile home of some fellow retirees to find the husband inching from a tiny compartment, smiling while waving out a match. There is a nice pause while we, and Nicholson, queasily realise what area in the caravan the man is emerging from.
Yet such is their use, either as roaming dwellings or as one kind or another of semi-permanent outside room, and so well do they fit in the parking space between today’s twin social forces of population mobility and urban overcrowding, that caravans cry out for reinvention. It was never inevitable that trailers should end up with a trailer-park stigma. The inventor of the modern caravan, the eccentric Victorian polymath William Gordon Stables, travelled in his horse-drawn version with his valet. The first motorised model, the Eccles, with mahogany panelling and lead-light windows, was so expensive that when it was unveiled at the 1919 British Motor Show only a duchess ordered one.
However, as the 20th century progressed, growing prosperity and mass production made caravans affordable even to some of the poorest in society. Aesthetic considerations were inevitably diluted or discarded in the process, except in the case of one manufacturer, Airstream, whose sinuous, silver, gleaming slimline caravans are instantly recognisable exceptions to the square-white-box standard.
The brainchild of one Wally Byam in the 1930s (at the behest of his wife, who refused to go camping without a kitchen), the Airstream was based on riveted aircraft construction and has changed little in its external appearance since then. Last year it enjoyed the peculiar distinction of joining the Museum of Modern Art’s collection of classic automotive designs, which also include the Volkswagen Beetle and the Jaguar E-type. It stood out, too, at this year’s Form London modern art and design show: the Airstream has just been introduced to the British market.
Yet, for all its rugged outward appeal, the Airstream was looking dated on the inside – until architect Christopher Deam, fresh from the acclaimed interior design of a tiny cottage using ideas from boat and caravan construction, was appointed to give it a makeover. The caravan’s “romantic vision of self-containment, self-sufficiency and mobility” was the lure for Deam but he wanted to avoid the “typical language of mobile home and trailer interiors, what I call the ‘Graceland aesthetic’. It doesn’t change, no matter how much money you throw at it: you just get more etched glass, more leaping tigers and and bigger, clunkier glass handles.”
Deam’s alternative is a sleek and functional interior of gleaming metal and re-imagined laminate that immediately makes you want to spend more time inside, rather than wanting to leave imagined sock-and-sandal wearing inhabitants to their drab furnishings and dubious smells. Yet, despite the tug of travel, many Airstream owners stay put. Jon Weisberg keeps his 10-metre model on a desert property in south-central Utah surrounded by cacti, sandstone cliffs and bald eagles and “never takes it out on the road”. He and his wife, a former Dior designer who re-upholstered the caravan “to give it greater style”, use it for “vegging out and to explore the landscape”; they intend soon to rent it out to vacationers.
Other Airstream owners, says Bruce Littlefield, the author of Airstream Living, have used them as “backyard guesthouses, art studios, make-up trailers, mobile offices, hotdog stands” and a clubhouse for teenage offspring. Some become so habituated to their caravans they don’t want to leave: one caravan-dweller had hers retro-fitted to hold her best crystal; another, Rich Luhr, ended up sleeping in his with his wife and child in the drive. A slick redesign such as Deam’s is one way to re-imagine the trailer; another is to make it an ironic, retro experience. As a child Annabel Lewis wanted nothing more than to live in the caravan her father kept next to the pheasant pen on their Lake District land. As an adult she transported it – complete, she discovered, with a family of mice – to London where, installing a new bed but retaining the kitsch melamine panelling, she festooned the outside with flamboyant, Victorian-era ribbons sold by her passementerie company, VV Rouleaux.
Lewis now uses her shaggy caravan as a spare bedroom and as a portable one when she goes to parties. And Belgian artist Wim van den Bogaert has devised modular swirling wood-carved panels that he attaches to the 1960s caravans he covets for their solid design which, he says, “disappeared from the 1970s onwards” and for their price – frequently less than €1,000.
Others, more seriously, see the trailer as a vehicle of the future. The recently completed TrailerWrap project, based around the University of Colorado, sought, in the words of its prospectus, to reinvent the maligned trailer, a “typology of despair”, as a “model for equitable, high-density alternatives to suburban sprawl”. To this end, a cramped two-bedroom donor trailer was gutted and transformed into a “single, loft-like volume” whose ceiling “extended out to incorporate a new kind of outdoor space combining aspects of a front porch with the benefits of a patio”.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
FT link to full article – CLICK HERE.
Christopher Macgowan
Friedrichshafen, Germany.
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Christopher Macgowan: “The CAP site just east of Friedrichshafen is a wonderful spot to stay at on the banks of Lake Konstance with towering mountains in view on the other side.”
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