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Airstream trailers on a roll with collectors

'Land yacht' lauded for its architecture

Thursday, June 15, 2000

By BARBARA FLANAGAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES

"The property is like a collection of little events," Barbara Jakobson said of her summer place in East Hampton, N.Y. "It's a little compound." She listed the small pieces: main house, shed, summer room, tennis court, pool and, parked in a poof of wild grasses, a garden folly posing as pool house -- an old, 21-foot-long aluminum travel trailer.

But it's not just any old metal trailer. It's an Airstream land yacht, circa 1974 (complete with the original orange shag carpet). Jakobson is a collector of 20th-century industrial design and a board member of the Museum of Modern Art and the Architectural League of New York.

Constructed with gleaming aircraft-grade aluminum, vintage Airstream trailers are now viewed by collectors as artful architecture.<P-I file/1978 So when she said, "The Airstream is one of the most important artifacts of industrial design of the 20th century," she wasn't fooling around. She bought her trailer a few years ago from South Jersey Airstream in Vineland, N.J., which sells comparable ones for about $5,000 today.

The price has gone up, because she is not alone in her ardor. Lord Palumbo, the British connoisseur known as a collector of world architecture, harbors two Airstreams in Plano, Ill., at the aesthetically serene Farnsworth House, the 1950 Modernist landmark in steel and glass designed by Mies van der Rohe and later bought by Lord Palumbo. For now, the Airstreams are sitting idle on the estate, one near the visitor's gate and the other near a garage.

Of course, the cult of loving Airstreams as portable appliances -- nifty gadgets made of aircraft-grade Alclad aluminum -- isn't new. What's is the cult of loving Airstreams as indoor and outdoor architecture: used alone or in conjunction with other structures. These days, it's chic to buy a vintage Airstream, 25 years old or older, for prices ranging from $1,000 to $9,000, gut and redecorate (in California, remodelers line them with such things as custom sheepskin and resell them for $16,000 to $28,000) or preserve and retro-accessorize. The Airstreams are used as cabanas, guest houses, offices, waiting rooms, think tanks, darkrooms, studios and garden cottages.

Parking Airstreams quasi-permanently is naughty enough. The 1955 Airstream owner's manual warns, "Remember the Airstream creed, 'Don't ever let your wheels stop rolling for more than 30 days at a time.'"

But the practice of using the travel trailers as ad hoc rooms often challenges zoning codes, which favor big, solid, one-family houses on big lots. Most towns don't want compounds of little buildings. And certainly not trailers. ("Inhabited" and "permanent" structures, most codes say, should be assembled, attached to the ground, hooked to utilities; in other words, should be real buildings.) And some codes ban large vehicles from parking on streets and driveways.

Grace Jeffers, a design historian, calls parked Airstreams "occasional architecture." For her, the trend might at least raise some important questions about how living units ought to be made, used and regulated. "There's a lot of potential in low-cost, modular, prefab housing," Jeffers said. "You can buy a trailer for less than it costs to add a wing to your house. And for visiting family members, it's a way of giving them independence and privacy."

For the moment, Jeffers and Jim Huff, her partner in Inside Design, a consulting firm, are working with Airstream to introduce a model with updated interiors. (New Airstreams sell for $30,000 to $78,000.)

Last month, Inside Design showed a revamped Airstream aimed at a hipster market, with new laminate interiors, at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. For many people, though, the most appealing Airstreams date back to the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

What's the appeal? "I've tried to analyze why people respond to these classic vintage Airstreams," Jakobson said. "I'm sure the reason is that its form relates to the primitive hut, or a cave, and it's buried deep within the collective unconscious. The shape says, 'Get into me, and I will take care of you.'"

Gary Soeffker, the on-site manager of the Elkhorn Guest Ranch, near Missoula, Mont., could live in a real house with his 15-year-old son but prefers to live in a trailer park in a 1978 Airstream outfitted with awning and fire pit. "It forces me into a certain behavior," Soeffker said. "You can't leave the bed unmade or let dishes pile up."

Felderman & Keatinge Associates, architects in Santa Monica, Calif., think the trailers are good for the workplace. So far, they have inserted four Airstreams (and one 1969 Volkswagen bus) into projects. In the lobby of MTV's West Coast headquarters in Santa Monica they used one AstroTurf-landscaped Airstream as a waiting room. "But we see grown men in there having meetings," said Nancy Keatinge, a partner in the firm.

For Pinnacle Studios, a special effects company, the architects deployed three Airstreams as living rooms cum editing bays. "We don't just do it for the fluke of it," Keatinge said. "The Airstreams make the editing process more enjoyable."

Tom Hawver, a wall covering designer in New York, has a 1955, 16-foot Bambi, but no property yet. He envisions a kind of Adirondack camp in Sullivan County, N.Y. "It would be an Airstream compound with a cabin as the main house," he said. "After a night of playing Parcheesi, each couple would retire to their own Airstream."

Currently, his Bambi, bought for $3,500 in Los Angeles, resides at the Jersey Shore Airstream Haven, a "land yacht harbor" near Cape May. Hawver, who lives with a couple of Vespas in his TriBeCa loft, redecorated his Airstream with fabric from his own line of imported linens -- Hawver Interior Material -- doing curtains, bed and dinette in "heavy-duty naturals" that suit the original hard surfaces of knotty pine. More tentative is Hawver's idea of starting an "urban mobile home community" made up of Airstreams on Manhattan rooftops. "They're more spacious than most studio apartments," he pointed out.

Some people not only regard Airstreams as artful architecture, but also use them to make art. Anne-Catrin Spiess, a Swiss artist living in the West Village, uses her 1971 Airstream as a studio and darkroom in parts of the country so remote she needs a satellite phone to stay in touch. When the trailer is not in Nebraska or Newfoundland, it lives in a campground near Blairstown, N.J. (storage: $40 a month).

John Ringel, Steve Badanes and Jim Adamson, designer-builders who work under the name Jersey Devil, built a concrete beach house in Islamorada, Fla., in 1991 and put an Airstream on a patio to serve as au pair apartment and guest room. "I still own three of them," Badanes said. "Hey, the insurance is 60 bucks a year."

Badanes keeps his trailers in Washington state, Missouri and Vermont, where he is still assembling his summer "vacation estate," with one Airstream, one Prairie Schooner (another kind of trailer), a deck and an outhouse. "The bottom line is that they are cool-looking," Badanes said. "It's like living in a little tube, and when you're lying in bed, you can look at all the curves."

There is one downside to the obsession, however. "Movie stars -- Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson -- are driving up the prices of the old ones," Badanes said. Alas, what's left to buy that's undiscovered, retro and cheap? Perhaps mobile homes, ranch style, are the last frontier.

© 2000 The New York Times.
All rights reserved.