Furniture maker Christian Cole's handcrafted holiday house on wheels

If you’ve noticed a Cooma Coaches bus edging its way around Torquay lately, don’t worry, it’s not lost. The same if you see it parked at caravan parks up Australia’s east coast. You’ve spotted the holiday house (on wheels) of cabinet and furniture maker Christian Cole.

From the outside it looks a little like it did six years ago when Christian and his wife, Fiona, and two kids, now 16 and 13, picked it up from Cooma, near Canberra, to drive it home. If you peek inside, you’ll see the incredible result of that work. Essentially, it’s a masterpiece of painstakingly-handcrafted everything.

First destination? The Cole family home in suburban Brunswick West. “We backed it in,” Cole recalls. “It took me three and a half hours to get it into the backyard. That’s how it started. Then I started working on it.” After finishing work at his Coburg North factory, he’d go home and “start tinkering”.

It was a complex tinker. “I had to reframe the whole bus, and I made all these little curved jigs out of ply,” he explains. “And steam vent walnut around all the windows, with 30 clamps on each window.” It took him a day to do one. He calls that the worst bit. The best bit? “The smell of the French oak from crushing vats. We straightened red wine crushing vats from Mildura, for the floor and ceiling,” he explains. “It was a shame to seal it!”

Cole worked on the 12-metre by two-metre bus in his backyard for over a year, with Fiona working on the layout for the 30-square metre space, and the kids helping with the gutting of it, or just hanging around. “Since it was in the backyard, they’d come and hang out, play basketball, and have a chat to me while I was working on it.”

His vision for the bus was simple: “To be able to drive wherever you like for the weekend, go up to Byron Bay, and have some time in it with the kids.” But it wasn’t simple. “It got quite involved. I had to get engineering certificates: I had to weld big plates underneath the seats, the seats had to come with their certification to say they’re up to Australian standards. Had to do all the water tanks, the black tanks, weld them all up.”

Still, years later, he’s got a bus that can go completely off grid. “It’s got solar power, panels on the roof, and you can plug it in as well. There’s a 750-litre fresh water tank, and diesel generator.”

The first adventure for the Cooma Coach (it’s yet to be named, though they’re considering Trevor after a mate from Cooma who swapped one of Cole’s trademark tables and a bit of cash for the bus) was to Byron Bay. “It was interesting.” Cole says. “We tried to do a couple of u-turns and oh my God, oh my God!”

“We’d get to a caravan park and not know if we were going to actually fit in there. So we had to ring them as we were coming into town: ‘Hi, we’ve got a 40-foot coach, are we going to be able to fit in?’” Cole says. And, once parked, the Cooma Coach became a caravan park curiosity. “A lot of people want to come and have a look,” he says. “It wasn’t the best sometimes, because you wanted to relax!”

Cole says he would have spent $50,000 on the bus in materials. “And that’s without my labour,” he admits. And it’s not exactly finished. “It got to a point where I had to accept that a little bit of wallpaper is not finished in the corner. Too bad,” he says. “It was creative and fun. There was a lot of that in it. So it was a bonus to be able to go away and have fun in it with the kids. The boys love it. They just kick back with seatbelts on … Barry the dog is in there.”

The family has since bought, and renovated, a historic home in Torquay, which gave him a different project. But you can tell he’s itching for his next one. Still, family holidays are sorted. Next stop for the boutique bus? The aptly named Eden.