Can caravan holidays ever be cool?
In a year not exactly short of surprises, perhaps the biggest one yet is that caravan holidays are enjoying a comeback. I speak from pretty solid experience: late last summer, as a grounded travel and culture writer, I bought a caravan with two of my best friends, art consultant and interior stylist Emma Jane Palin and interior designer Whinnie Williams. We all live on the same street in Margate, and share a love of midcentury design, and we’ve often daydreamed about opening a fabulous hotel together. This was our pandemic business plan B: a three-bedroom static 2010 Willerby Bluebird in Birchington Vale Holiday Park. All three of us grew up with caravan holidays in our lives, and have nostalgic memories of caravan life by the sea; hanging out in the arcades with boys, spending all our money on Curly Wurlys in the tuckshop, and the excitement of caravan sleeping arrangements, like tucked-away bunkbeds or pull-out sofas.
The team behind Club Jupiter
Joanna Bongard
And so we spent our winter lockdown giving our beloved Creme Brulee (so-named because of her beige and brown interiors) a melodramatic makeover, with a mock-brick desert-modern style fireplace, marmoleum flooring throughout, tongue and groove wooden ceiling, and reupholstered the original sofa in Poodle & Blonde velvet designed by Whinnie. When we set up our company, Club Jupiter we joked that we were creating a “Pontins meets Palm Springs” vibe, so that British travellers could travel across the world… all from a caravan in Birchington. Emma’s Space Disco bedroom is all sequins and mirrors, transporting guests to Studio 54 in 1970s New York. Whinnie’s Lonely Hearts Saloon is a pink cowgirl fantasy, inspired by a ranch holiday we took together in Arizona last February… a few weeks before the Covid crisis hit. My Jungle Room is part-inspired by Elvis Presley’s ridiculous Jungle Room at his home of Graceland in Memphis, all bamboo and rattan and tiki lamps. As a grounded travel writer, I wanted to take people places.
We were inspired by a love of caravan holidays and a love of flamboyant midcentury design, and fabulous themed hotels like California’s Madonna Inn, but deep down, we really want adventure-hungry travellers like ourselves to feel they can have fabulous holidays here in the UK. Staying in a holiday park is also a community-minded decision in areas – like Margate – that experience overtourism in the summer months, sidestepping the thorny issue of communities being affected by houses taken out of the rental market to function as holiday homes.
