Belgian architect Axel Enthoven has designed a mobile holiday home that resembles the Sydney Opera House.
Called Opera, the canvas holiday home unfolds from a trailer and includes two beds, a toilet, hot and cold water, LED lighting and a mobile hob.
It is handmade and fitted out with materials including hardwood, stainless steel and leather.
The design will be on show at the Design at Work trade fair in Kortrijk, Belgium, next month.
Here's some more information from Enthoven:
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Multiple award-winner Axel Enthoven designs new mobile holiday home
Opera offers freedom in nature with 100 percent luxury
It is not a tent, not a caravan and not a motor home. The new mobile holiday home designed by Axel Enthoven has been christened Opera for its striking shape, reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House. The subtitle chosen is Your Suite in Nature to suggest the best of hotel rooms, but in the heart of nature in this case. The Opera allows you to stay in the most beautiful places, but with the luxury of a wine cabinet, warm-air heating, espresso bar and an enclosed teak veranda. This nomadic, contemporary living tent offers the quality of a luxury yacht combined with the outdoor feeling of camping under canvas. The Opera will be presented for the first time at the Design at Work trade fair in Kortrijk in December.
The finishing touches are currently being put to the first Operas, which are being made completely by hand in Geldrop in the Netherlands. Only first class materials like hardwood, stainless steel and leather are used in production. The dimensions of the Opera are magical. When it has opened and levelled itself by electric power – inside 5 minutes and without tent pegs, stabilizer jacks and loose tent poles – what you see is a residence measuring 7 metres long, more than 3 metres wide and 3.5 metres high with every conceivable luxury: two first class and electrically adjustable beds that become one with a single simple movement, hot and cold water, ceramic toilet, LED lighting and a mobile hob and barbecue, for example, for cooking outside. An exclusive, small number of Operas will go into production in 2010.
The mobile holiday home will be supplied with what is known as the Opera Guide, which presents a selection of exclusive sites with information about good restaurants and picturesque destinations in the surrounding area.
The Opera was conceived and developed by Rob Vos, in partnership with a consortium of investors. Vos previously more than made his mark in the automotive industry.
The designer of the Opera is Axel Enthoven, who has won more than 25 international awards in eight different countries, possibly the most important of which was the Belgian Henri van der Velde Career Prize. Enthoven has been Professor and head of the department of Man & Mobility at the Academy of Industrial Design in Eindhoven since 1989. Previous to this, he held an appointment as a visiting professor at the National Institute for Architecture, Construction Engineering and Urban Planning in Antwerp. Axel’s firm, Enthoven Associates, has designed more than 1700 products and has offices in Paris, Eindhoven and Antwerp.
The Opera will be presented for the first time at the Design at Work trade fair in Kortrijk from 8 to 10 December inclusive.