It’s time to rethink the caravan holiday!

Renovating a static van of her own has given Anna Hart plenty of ideas for refreshing the genre

Last February, a few weeks before the Covid crisis drove me back to the UK, I was cycling around Palm Springs for Modernism Week. This annual 11-day California desert festival dedicated to midcentury and modern design and architecture had been high on my travel list for years. My week snooping around the open homes didn’t disappoint, and I happily took photographs and scribbled design notes in the holiday mansions of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood royalty such as Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Walt Disney.

One year later, I was revisiting these notes and snaps, searching for inspiration in renovating a caravan in a Margate holiday park. With two designer friends, I’ve been refurbishing a 2010 three-bedroom Willerby Bluebird to match our wildest midcentury design fantasies, with plans to rent it out as holiday accommodation. Our microbusiness, Club Jupiter (clubjupiter.co.uk) is the sort of bonkers idea to which 2020 lent itself; I was a grounded travel writer, longing for California and my favourite hotels and motels, with a thousand ideas on travel innovation.

Emma Jane Palin is a design consultant and stylist, Whinnie Williams an interior designer, and our project was born out of a weekly coffee morning aimed at supporting each other through the weirdest of years. Oddly, caravan holidays are the only type of domestic tourism not to have been “reimagined” and cannily marketed over the past decade. We no longer stay in a mid-range hotel; it’s a “boutique hotel” with welcome gin and avocado on the breakfast menu. Camping is “glamping”, shepherd’s huts are £200-a-night “rustic bolt-holes”. But caravan holidays have resisted this slick of marketing gloss.

I find this strange, because in New Zealand, Germany and the United States, aspirational trailer parks and caravan sites are doing a roaring trade catering to millennials, Generation Z-ers and their parents. One favourite is El Cosmico (elcosmico.com) in Marfa, Texas, where vintage Airstreams decked out with Mexican blankets and contemporary art intersperse with yurts and safari tents around a yoga studio, food trucks and a music stage. Travelling around New Zealand, I worked for one summer as a “tipi caretaker” at Solscape (solscape.co.nz), a bohemian campsite in the surf town of Raglan.

In Britain, though, we still dismiss caravans as bland beige boxes and view caravan parks with a shudder. But I’m banking on this changing. We are more reliant on UK breaks than ever before, forced to rethink everything from how much we would pay for a cottage in Cornwall to how far we would drive.

Margate, unlike comparable British resorts, lacks a decent high-occupancy hotel, so Airbnb dominates the holiday accommodation landscape. There will always be those who prefer a home rental to a hotel, and the likes of Airbnb and Plum Guide are harmless as part of the overall picture. In popular destinations, though, a high proportion of homes have been yanked out of the rental market to function as holiday homes, driving up housing costs for locals and pricing people out of town.

Staying in a holiday park is a conscious way of sidestepping this ethical issue. This is my “serious” reason for shouting my support of caravans. I also have a hundred silly reasons for adoring them. The comforting creak as I step into a caravan transports me back to childhood holidays in Portstewart in Northern Ireland, one of our summer options. And I still get a thrill when I walk past the arcade at Birchington Vale Holiday Park in Margate, remembering the fun we had as kids in the games rooms and tuck shops at caravan parks.

But it’s not all nostalgia. As an adult I’ve come to admire the creativity with which caravan owners stamp their individuality on a beige box, with flower baskets, textiles, vintage homeware, fabulous wallpaper and artificial-turf gardens. I love the community spirit among these kindred nomadic, unpretentious and eccentric souls. Caravan parks are safe, happy spaces where every day is a holiday, and this past year, painting and sanding bamboo in a caravan park has kept me sane.

This weekend, Whinnie, Emma and I are having our first sleepover in our caravan, before handing it over to Airbnb guests. I feel certain it will be the most satisfying staycation of my life.

To read more articles by Anna Hart, see telegraph.co.uk/tt-anna-hart