Have you ever spent the night in an old storage facility from the 70’s that was a vintage camper trailers theme park?
Contributed by: Thomas Lenz
The vintage camper trailer hobby is not unique to the USA. We have subscribers to the Vintage Camper Trailers Magazine in a dozen different countries. Most of them are in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, but we also have some in Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand, France, Norway, and Thailand. The news of this unique hotel/theme park came to us from Germany!
You would not expect this from Germany’s rather sleepy Bonn, the country’s former capital, but it is the hometown of one of the craziest hotel concepts you may have heard of – or did you ever spend the night in a vintage camper theme park hosted inside an old storage facility from the 70’s? Probably not, because “Base Camp Bonn” is the only one of its kind.
Quirky enough, every trailer has its own theme, look and name: “Safari”, “Rockabilly”, “Flower power”, “Drag Queen” and so on. “The idea was to create something tongue-in-cheek that hadn’t been done before”, says owner Michael Schloesser. “When we had decided to use vintage trailers as hotel rooms we thought: This is already pretty weird, why not go full bonkers?” He hired German set-designer Marion Seul to give every trailer its unique look. And with her experience from the movie industry she came up with some quite unexpected and funny but nevertheless cozy designs that will make you forget that you are actually inside a storage facility.
Walking through the location might rather make you feel like being on an actual film set. Imagine “Alice in Wonderland” with vintage trailers. Says Schloesser, “It took us almost two years to set everything up. Among many other things we had to build showers and bathrooms because these old trailers had none of that.” But also, the place itself got its own design – Caribbean style. An outside area with trees, lounge seats and a food station completes the picture and allows concerts and summer events too.
