If you asked a fashionable product designer to create a stylish travel trailer, it’s a fair bet they would struggle a little with the brief.
Although recreational-vehicle ownership, boosted by the coronavirus years, is at a record high—11.2 million American households have a trailer, motor home, or camper—in the bars of downtown New York, over lunch at the Polo Lounge, and in fashionable haunts in Silicon Valley and Georgetown, talk among cosmopolitan elites rarely turns to R.V.-ing.
The extreme lack of cool that R.V. life epitomizes is far from a function of poverty, even if a million Americans do live permanently in trailer parks. Prosperous people own R.V.’s, too. Many retirees buy massive land yachts for $1 million or more and become “snowbirds,” chasing the sun all year long. Film and TV stars often have opulent—borderline vulgar—motor homes on set. And it’s currently popular among some younger, edgier people, especially since the Oscar-winning 2020 movie Nomadland, to take to the roads in a customized Sprinter van, the latest take on the traditional VW camper van.
However, the fact that R.V.-ing overwhelmingly remains a suburban, middle-aged, middle-American pursuit is reflected in the design of most of the 30,000 such mass-market vehicles built each month. On the highway, R.V.’s look either crudely utilitarian or repellently flashy. Step inside, and you’ll find them invariably bland or chintzy.
Enter Geneva Long, a 34-year-old graduate of the Wharton School of Business and the scion of a Toronto tech family, who is making a dramatic—some would say optimistic—intervention to adapt travel trailers for discriminating vacationers.
Bowlus, her Santa Barbara–based company, hand-builds gleaming, aluminum travel trailers, inspired by a 1934 design, to appeal to the well-heeled and design-conscious. Creatives, professionals, tech dudes, and big-time actors are spending as much as $350,000—10 times the price of an equivalent midsize, mid-market travel trailer, such as a Winnebago—to enjoy the all-American outdoor life in impeccable style.
Long’s tasteful trailers are so striking that even an East Coast or California sophisticate could hardly fail to notice one of the few hundred reimagined Bowluses on the road. The rear has a tapering teardrop design, protected by a trademark. If you follow a Bowlus on the road, it looks like you are being glared at by a head in a suit of armor, or by an alien, the eyeholes being the two windows of the master bedroom.
The interior, narrower than most trailers, brings to mind a small picnic boat or private jet. It’s filled with solid birch and other fine woods, hand-sewn Japanese fabrics, and loads of technology, including Starlink satellite Internet.
Bowlus is also very much an eco-friendly proposition, light enough to be towed by an electric vehicle without much loss of range. Its appliances are powered by 17,000 kilowatt-hours’ worth of its own batteries, topped up by solar panels on the roof. The Bowlus is designed to remain off-road, off-grid, and, most notably, off trailer parks, for weeks at a time.
If you follow a Bowlus on the road, it looks like you are being glared at by a head in a suit of armor, or by an alien.
Back in the early 1930s, when Hawley Bowlus, the aircraft pioneer who built the Spirit of St. Louis for Charles Lindbergh, made his original trailer, the heavily riveted, mirror-like exterior radiated airplane-inspired, streamlined modernity. Today, however, while touting a distinctly retro look, the Bowlus also speaks to 21st-century veneration of nature as it reflects and melds with the wilderness in which it is built to live.
Needless to say, today’s Bowlus is not the only shiny, aluminum, riveted trailer in R.V.-land. The equivalent-length Airstream, which is wider, taller, and heavier than a top-of-the-line Bowlus, is for most people the original vintage-style trailer. It also costs less than half the price.
But the Bowlus actually came first. The founder of Airstream, Wally Byam, was a salesman for Bowlus who started his own company in California when Hawley Bowlus went back to making aircraft, having never patented or trademarked the reflective, riveted, aluminum R.V. concept.
What drove Geneva Long a decade ago, in her early 20s and freshly graduated, to start building travel trailers modeled on a design dating from her grandparents’ day? Her parents, it turns out, had bought a moldering 1935 Bowlus they found on a farm in the Pacific Northwest and, after bringing it back to Toronto, spent 10 years restoring it.
“By the time it was finished and ready to take on a trip, I had graduated Wharton and was looking to do something different from the typical Wharton track,” Long tells AIR MAIL. “We had had such a great reaction to our trailer on the road that we went away and prototyped the new, improved, modern Bowlus travel trailer.”
Long, who confirms without naming names that Hollywood and Silicon Valley personalities have been among the first buyers, explains that building the trailers relatively small, at 27 feet, and with berths for a maximum of four people, is to give clients a chance to avoid the need to overnight in parking lots and commercial campsites.
“The whole [reason] … we designed the Bowlus the way we did is to go off-grid. With a traditional R.V., you need to go to campsites where you have power and sewer, and that limits you. Our customer is looking to camp in state and national parks. There are also fantastic communities called Harvest Hosts, where you can stay on a farm or winery, often at no cost.”
While it is tempting to see the company as a brave first attempt to bring elegance, exclusivity, and non-vulgar luxury to R.V.-ing, the recreational vehicle has not always been as populist as you might think.
It’s true that John Steinbeck bought the camper van he used to research Travels with Charley precisely so he could meet the kind of ordinary Americans he might not otherwise encounter. Yet Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were reputedly among the keen vacationers in the original Bowlus trailers.
Later, in the late 1930s, publisher, filmmaker, and bon viveur Myron Zobel commissioned from the Schult trailer company, in Chicago, a 40-foot R.V. costing $20,000. The Continental Clipper, as he and his wife called it, had a chauffeur with his own quarters in the towing vehicle, air-conditioning, pigskin wall coverings, a wine cellar, a stainless-steel kitchen, a radiotelephone, and a flying bridge, where the Zobels could enjoy a sundowner as they were driven in splendor.
As Zobel recounted in an amusing 1955 book, The 14-Karat Trailer, when the huge expense of maintaining the trailer defeated them, they sold it to King Farouk of Egypt, a notoriously extravagant playboy of the day. After he was deposed in a coup, in 1952, the Clipper ended up in India, in the garage of a maharaja.
Today, there are still big names who are reported to be R.V. fans, although it is hard to find out quite to what extent. Among them are supposedly Matthew McConaughey, Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Jeff Daniels, and the country-music stars Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley.
Whoever you are, though, one seemingly unavoidable aspect of R.V. life is the intimate relationship you are required to develop with your own waste products. No matter the glory of the back-to-nature wilderness idyll you’re enjoying, the unpleasantness of domestic life ends up needing to be emptied.
Is there some way, AIR MAIL asked Geneva Long, for Bowlus owners to avoid hooking up to the standard campground R.V. dump station after a couple of days of showering, washing up, and using the toilet?
Long clicked into what one imagines is a well-practiced sales line for the semi-convinced but still queasy, explaining that the toilet in Bowlus trailers is an advance on old-fashioned sewer tanks, because the waste runs into a cassette that can be slotted out and emptied into a regular toilet on the road.
It still doesn’t sound like everyone’s idea of a great time, we said.
“That’s the thing about an R.V.,” she replied. “Some of the fun it gives you is that independence. But that means it’s not a full-service type of hobby. The best and the most fun experiences aren’t always the easiest, are they?”
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology