Is the Romotow the world’s most stylish caravan?

Hailing from New Zealand, the Romotow caravan increases your living space through an innovative, pivoting design.

Caravans have never really been interesting to look at in terms of their design. They’re a box on wheels, at the end of the day.

And while the popularity of caravanning in Australia has exploded in the past few years, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the basic design of a caravan.

The Romotow, which hails from New Zealand, is not your average caravan. 

This innovative and modern RV is the creation of Stuart Winterbourne Matt Wilke, a New Zealand-based engineering and architecture team that is normally busy working on high-end housing projects and developments.

The basic idea of the Romotow design came about more than 10 years ago. Production examples have emerged recently, and the fledgling brand is now taking orders from around the world.

The Romotow is a two-berth caravan, so those of us who are keen to travel with kids will be disappointed.

It’s also quite large, measuring in at nine metres long (or 27 foot), as well as being 3400mm tall and 2450mm wide.

The key part of the interesting designs is the in-built pivoting function, which allows the body of the caravan to rotate 90 degrees to create an L-shape. The bedroom and living area of the caravan stay enclosed, while the outer casing of the van creates extra outdoor living space.

Once set up, the T8’s trick opening function gives 70 per cent more living space overall. 

All of this additional hardware does increase the weight of the caravan, however. The tare weight of the Romotow T8 is approximated to be 3400kg.

This means you’ll need to look at something like a Ram or Silverado – something with a braked towing capacity of 4500kg – to accommodate loading up the van with some camping gear and equipment.

The Romotow is priced from NZD$295,000 (AUD$273,000) in it’s most basic Shell form, while the most expensive Ultimate variant – is priced from NZD$475,000 (AUD$440,000).

The Shell model gets no interior fitout, and is instead described as a ‘blank canvas’, suitable for commercial fit-outs. 

And while the Ultimate variant gets adorned with things like upholstered walls, ducted air conditioning, air suspension, an upgraded sound system and extended solar capacity, buyers can choose to split the difference with a NZD$375,000 ($347,000) Pure model.

Romotow says it “wanted to bring the build quality of a yacht to land”, using materials and building techniques more regularly seen on seafaring ships.

The Romotow can also be had as a more ‘regular’ C8 caravan, which doesn’t have the rotating ability for extra space, but does keep the same modern, concept-like shape.

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