Mobile Mini House Expanding RV Concept

Circular Folding RV Design Project Catches Public Interest

Apr 29, 2009 Thomas Alan Gray

The 2006 Minimaousse, a design contest to "make the most of space", produced an imaginative semicircular RV called the "252° Living Area" or Mobile Mini House.

Is this the RV of the future?

The ‘Mobile Mini House’ RV was a project by design students Stéphanie Bellanger, Amaury Watine, François Gustin & David Dethoor. Apparently inspired by John Lautner’s octagonal Chemosphere house, the mobile mini house was has an ingenious expanding floor plan that opens like a Japanese fan. Study the photos below this article to understand the concept.

Features of the Mobile Mini House

Arc of 30 degrees unfurls into a 252° semicircle,
Five modular rooms : bedroom, bath, living room, kitchen and office.
Cutouts in walls allow for horizontal features (beds, sofa etc.) to interlock when the trailer is folded up
A pullout screen, shown as transparent in the model, provides roof and walls
Designed to be pulled by a mini car (yes, even the Mini Cooper!)

The Mobile Mini House Team

At the time this article was published and, according to their websites, the talented team has spread around the world.

Stéphanie Bellanger of Paris is currently looking for a position
François Gustin is in Vienna at Element Design
David Dethoor is in second year at ISD design school.
Amaury Watine is at New Delhi's Ultraconfidentiel Design

The Design Contest, Minimaousse2, 2006

Bellanger and her team created the project in the fall of 2005. "Our team worked on it for a school project during around four months at the Superior Institute of Design (ISD) of Valenciennes, in the north of France."

They entered it in a French micro-architecture contest called Minimaousse, a biannual contest for students of art, architecture, design and engineering. The contest is intended for « L’éloge du petit, une petite architecture qui doit faire le maximum » ( "In praise of the tiny, making small architecture do the most").

The 2006 contest, Minimaousse2, had the theme of « mini-maison roulante » (little house on wheels or rolling mini house, hence Bellanger's project title of Mobile Mini House). The intent of the project was stated as "to encourage maximal use of space, the interior elements must reconfigure to provide new uses within the same area." («Pour répondre à une utilisation maximale de l’espace, les éléments intérieurs du projet changent de configuration pour laisser place à une nouvelle utilisation de ce même espace. » )

The mobile mini house of Bellanger, Watine, Gustin, and Dethour won a "coup de coeuer" award (roughly "honorable mention").

Mobile Mini House is Only a Concept

Although this is clearly only a concept, many comments on various web sites complain of the lack of roof, of the transparent covering, the lack of plumbing, the inability of the unit to fit in standard camp sites, and so forth, as though the mobile mini-house were a realistic proposal. An example is the writeup on dvice.com that said, "Hope you aren't shy: the shower features a wall that'll barely hide you from other occupants in the house, though expose you to the rest of the world."

No doubt Bellanger and her team are amused at such concerns. "This moving mini house is just a concept. Even if we tried to push at most the technical development, everything is not adjusted for a departure in production," she told Suite101.

Other entries in Minimaousse2 included an inflatable car, a building with fold-out walls, a living room that folded out of the back of an SUV, and a variety of tents. In fact, one of the top winners was a skateboard with a fold-out tent attached.

Imaginative as these entries are, none seem to have attracted much attention; in that, the Mobile Mini House is a clear winner.

The copyright of the article Mobile Mini House Expanding RV Concept in RV Recreation is owned by Thomas Alan Gray. Permission to republish Mobile Mini House Expanding RV Concept in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.