RVers love our rigs. But sometimes, the paint jobs and interior decor are enough to make your head swirl as you reach for the Zofran. What’s a camper to do? Lord knows we’re not helping nudge the industry away from its tried-and-tired experiment with wavy designs and archaic color schemes. So let’s explore a bit what got us to the point of Pantone colors seemingly custom-chosen for hiding a 40-foot RV in the forest so even a park ranger hunting boondockers through the trees would be stymied.
First, about RVers… Spend some time in a campground or on RV and camping social media sites (or almost any social media, for that matter), and one thing becomes pretty clear pretty quickly: we RVers can be warm, welcoming, and willing to lend a hand or serve as your spotter when backing into your site (even if they break out the smartphone to capture the hilarity).
And we can be a surly, hard-to-please lot.
Case in point: I posted a photo recently about my pretty, new wind chimes.
What seemed a nanosecond later came the sass: a lass chimed in about how obnoxious it would be for me to hang that audible abomination anywhere near her campsite. People go camping to hear the sounds of birds chirping and campfires crackling and brooks babbling and college football on their big screen TV, she scolded (OK, she didn’t say that last part about football on big screens, but it’s pretty common among RVers. Head out to a college parking lot or some RV parks any Saturday afternoon, you’ll see).
Post something about a hitch assembly, and someone will find something wrong. Pull off some hack you thought was bad-ass? Ditto. After suffering two tire blow-outs, we posted about getting new Goodyear Endurance tires – the gold standard of trailer tiers.
“#dontwasteyourmoney,” someone replied.
You get the drift. RVers are a mixed lot full of opinions. Call it a design flaw inherent to humans.
But some of us have another flaw. We apparently are design- and color-blind – and those who aren’t aren’t very rebellious either. Otherwise, how can you explain the fugly exterior embellishments that for decades have blemished RVs as rolling eyesores we gladly drive down the highway and back into those campsites?
Those tacky laminates might have won the fancy of some RV industry exterior designer a couple of decades ago. But times change. What was striking a generation ago today is all “Ewww…”
Times change. But apparently, designers’ eyes don’t. And if there’s one place some in the RV community seem to find some common thinking, it’s on color of the rig’s shell. It can be the stuff of utter derision.
Trust us, inside it’s not much better. The log-cabin decor found in most RVs’ interiors is enough to give folk cabin fever a la Jack Nicholson’s character Jack Torrance in The Shining. Is it required that indoors and outdoors should share the same microcosmic color palette? Except for Airstreams, which have made their brand and appeal in the stainless steel plus black-and-white contemporary and retro (they are Airstream, after all), some designers continue to miss the memo on taste.
I guess brown and beige and every shade in between (and there apparently are a lot of them) are the only PMS colors the Recreational Vehicle Designers Consortium has been granted permission to deploy in some long-standing agreement with the Tacky Committee.
Now, back to that exterior…
In a recent story on the “supposedly feminist website” Jezebel.com (their description, not mine), writer and hopeful-future RV owner Esther Wang investigated Why Are RVs So F*cking Hideous? (my asterisk, not theirs)
Seems that during a cross-country jaunt, Ms. Wang “passed RV after RV plastered with what resembled tribal tattoo decals or in some extreme cases, flames.”
Hence, her bewilderment as why RVs are “so f*cking hideous?”
Hey, you said it yourself. We’re tribal. Who else would walk the aisles of Camping World. For hours? Every time we pass one on the highway? Even if we don’t really need anything? Even if we bitch about their allegedly lousy sales and service? (Yeah, it’s an “inside baseball” meets college Greek system kinda thing)
RV exteriors haven’t been horrible forever. Not even all are today. Not those from several decades ago bedecked with simple stripes, Wang allowed, nor those #vanlife conversions or sprinters that usually lack any external vinyl at all. Sleek is riche. Just like those magnificently timeless Airstreams.
Plain or the absence of color (or laminates), save the glean of polished stainless steel, is a design choice, too.
Wang lamented those “monster motorhomes plastered with what the industry euphemistically describes as ‘swoops and swirls.’” Make that the “RV Exterior Vinyl Industrial Complex,” noted someone on CheapRVLiving.com. (Funny place for that post, given how there’s little that’s “cheap” about the rigs that bear these tribal markings; I write this blog post as I’m watching Extreme RVs on Great American Country, where rigs – and fuel bills, I’m imagining – run in the millions. To that end, it’s been said that campers are people who spend a fortune to live like they’re homeless).
“Swoops and swirls…” If no eye for design, at least it seems the industry was given a thesaurus. That list of synonyms includes swoops and swirls and sweeps, swiggles, curlicues, even a Nike-esque swoosh – and other markings bereft of character or personality.
Unless ugly is a personality. And the industry hasn’t changed the aesthetic much at all. Even “aesthetic” is from a high school vocab list in an industry still struggling through third-grade, aesthetically speaking.
It’s still all pretty fugly.
We’re not all lemmings. Gone With The Wynns wrote about “Resurrecting Dinosaurs,” a robust project and posts on the need to think beyond the swirl (https://www.gonewiththewynns.com/influencing-rv-design-changes). Author Nikki Wynn posted four photos from sales brochures for four leading Class A RVs. Her take: “With the branding removed, I think they all look like they came from the same factory and the same design team.”
“Why is there no variety? Why are the styles essentially all the same? Why only market to one style of buyer?” she pondered. “Variety is the spice of life and right now, vanilla is the only RV style option.”
No Cherry Garcia or Phish Food to be found anywhere, it seems. Oh, where’s Further and those Merry Pranksters and bedecked in day-glo when your spirit needs them?!
The interwebs and The Facebook have other contrarians and rebels struggling to escape those icky brown interiors. They refinish or paint their cabinets. They paint over or repaper their wall paper. Some lay new laminate flooring. Some will even replace their window treatments (which if even in the most beautiful color, are a pitiful and flimsy assemblage of cheap fabric and metal).
And some, like me, just read their posts, longingly look at their beautiful DIY re-creations (some of these people deserve their own DIY Network show), and bemoan each time I walk into our travel trailer, Mr. Charlie, “We have to deal with these gawd-awful window treatments.”
Finally, someone’s getting the memo that maybe there’s more to life than vanilla (Dead Heads and Phish Heads, rejoice!) Look around and you’ll see a growing set of neuvo-retro trailers with clean lines, whitewall tires, and no swirls and swooshes to be found.
Grand Designs, a moderately up-market line of travel trailers and fifth wheels, has introduced more contemporary interiors and exteriors.
Winnebago has kinda gotten it right with its Minnie Winnie line that has escaped the brown-on-tan exterior. OK, it looks like trailers dipped in “Uh-Oh, it’s the Po-Po” blue or fire engine red. But it’s different, we’ll give them that.
Inside, some Winnies feature contemporary – if not washed faux wood – cabinetry that avoids that log-cabin, um, aesthetic. Outside and in, they’ve broken with tradition, such as it was.
Take that, Grizzly Adams.
But here we are, complaining about people complaining about things within our control – or at least the control of an industry stuck in some decade past.
“That’s one butt-ugly RV. Let’s talk financing.”
We bitch, then buy, then bitch some more. Reminds us of a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where some ancient Judeans (not surprisingly, with British accents) argued about which of two rebellious yet seemingly interchangeable factions was worthy of their allegiance. https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4
As not much of an aside, RV purists (snobs?) would correct us that “RVs” or recreational vehicles really refer to a subset of drivable campers. “Please don’t confuse them with travel trailers, fifth wheels, pop ups, vans, and sprinters.” We’re in the same tribe, and we’re debating nonsense. How American. But I digress…
Sure, RVs (in the generic, thank you) can be fugly. But we personalized the hell outta them. We hang art and accessories inside and power up laser lights and hang beautiful tapestries outside, especially for our music festival scene.
We even hang windchimes, much to at least one camper’s chagrin.
It’s our effort to make them unique and special and different from the nine million others (literally, we GTS’d it) tooling our highways – or the 239,850 RVs that rolled off the lots last year (down 22% so far this year, but the folks at Camping World and the RVIA would rather we not go there).
Swoosh and swirls and deep-woods brown may not be our palette of choice. But short of actually doing something about, we’ll sit back, flip on the lasers and some tunes or hook up the coax for some college pigskin or listen to our windchimes, and bemoan the next six-figure rig that rolls by with some tacky laminate covering.
“At least that’s not my RV.”