Hang Your Hat: Friday 6/26 Edition - 7 Modern Temporary Retreats

Take a look at these seven trailers and houseboats, each a modern testament to small space living and active lifestyles.

Above: Part tent, part RV, the NASA-inspired Cricket Trailer is the go-to camper for modern road trippers. Combining his small-space expertise and backpacking background, architect Garrett Finney designed the Cricket Trailer, a small, self-contained pop-up camper. It’s his response to bigger-is-better RV cul­ture: “It’s not a house on wheels but a portable adventure living space,” he says.
Photo by Sarah Wilson

In Berlin, Germany, brothers Chris and Oliver Laugsch bought a one-of-a-kind house boat for their vacation rental company, Welcome Beyond. Initially built as a home by a Dutch designer, the Modern House Boat is a three-room, 645-square-foot floating hotel. Instead of crisp sheets and room service, they offer a stellar city view and blissful peace and quiet.
Courtesy of Welcome Beyond

The jaunty boat-like shell of the Hütte Hut began with a case study undertaken by Brian and Katrina Manzo, the husband-and-wife team behind Sprouting Sprocket Studio. Keeping molded components to a minimum, the pair first designed a lightweight frame and then enclosed the structure with taut fabric and sheets of Jobert Okume marine plywood. The result is a teardrop-shaped caravan that can be towed behind a vehicle or parked in a backyard.
Courtesy of Skye Moorhead and David Johnston

Designer Alejandro Capdevila of Isola System built this approximately 800-square-foot floating house in Wrocław, Poland. “Generally floating houses are very expensive, and very ugly,” Capdevila says. “I wanted to build a floating house that was affordable, easy to build, secure, and very well designed.”
Courtesy of Alejandro Capdevila

In Canada’s Yukon Territory, a college instructor built a lightweight, efficient 97-square-foot mobile dwelling. The Leaf House is mobile trailer that was carefully engineered to weigh less than 5,000 pounds. The designer, Laird Herbert, used a metal-mesh, open-joint rainscreen as the cladding on the front end, and spruce pine at the back.
Courtesy of Leaf House

A C-Frame catamaran, Port X is a buoyant dwelling for modular, modern living. Prague’s Atelier SAD finished the concept last fall, collaborating with a company that develops sailing boats to fabricate its curved exterior. With a cost of roughly 55,000 euros per unit, the Port X home can be wired to survive off the grid.
Courtesy of Tomáš Souček

Offering herbal workshops, and playing host to the Trans-Pecos festival, El Cosmico is a hotel that’s engaged with the community. Guests stay close to the land, experiencing it in teepees, yurts, tents or trailers, like the one pictured here. By reducing the bedroom to its essentials and filling it with windows, the El Cosmico staff has made this small space as expansive as the desert beyond.
Photo by Nick Simonite
via Dwell