Lessons from caravan living: How to maximise your small space for style and functionality

In 2015, we purchased a 1960s 16-foot Millard Florida caravan in original vintage condition and transformed it into something beyond our expectations. Since then, we’ve transformed four more vintage caravans of various sizes and models and watched people around the world enthusiastically doing the same.

Each van renovation has taught us something new. The intricacies of designing and living in a small space, comfortably, have been an ever-evolving process.

What we’ve learned can be applied to small spaces in general, and if you get it right, there is a simplicity that comes with it that is hard to beat. These are the key things to take from caravan living and apply to your small spaces.

How to make your small space function well

Colour saturation creates mood

It’s a myth that smaller spaces require a neutral palette to create the illusion of space. Creating mood and feeling in a small space is much more important than fighting what the space is.

Colour creates theatre and anchor points. It’s how you apply it that matters. Saturating the space in colour achieves tonality and calm, which is especially beneficial in smaller spaces. Going hard on lots of vastly different colours creates a high contrast and can feel more intense and often chaotic in a small space.

Instead, layer shades of a similar colour. It might mean powder blue walls and cabinets with a navy-blue bed cover and upholstery or spearmint walls with emerald green soft furnishings. If it feels like you’re going to overdo the one colour, you’re probably on the right track. Just commit.

Strategically designed storage really matters

It pays to spend time thinking through your cabinetry to maximise your storage. Take stock of your inventory and work out where you want everything to live in terms of its size and the other items you want to group it with, and design your storage accordingly.

Accessibility and practicality are even more critical in a small space. Theoretically, we should have had the most storage in our largest van, Dolly (6.7 metres), as it was nearly two metres larger than our next largest van. However, we retained all the original ’70s cabinetry made up of many small overhead cupboards, which were hard to reach and too small to store anything of substance. It made those many cabinets almost redundant.

In our next van, we made sure our drawers and cupboards were large enough to store what we needed.

Hot tip: Don’t let the space under the bed go to waste. It’s the perfect spot for large drawers and ideal for storing toys, spare blankets and pillows.

Vertical surfaces will save you

When space is tight, your wall space should be maximised. Getting items off your horizontal surfaces – benchtops – and onto your vertical surfaces can be a game changer. The simplest way to achieve this is through strategically placed hooks.

If you have a hook on the wall in a small space, you will always have something hanging off it (hats, coats, keys). Wall shelves are also an effective use of vertical space, as they don’t take up precious floor space.

In a larger space, you might keep more decorative items on your open wall shelves; however, in a small space, you’ll want to use this space for day-to-day items. To reduce the visual chaos that can happen on open shelves, it’s a good idea to group similar items in labelled mesh baskets that sit neatly on those shelves.

Create drama and focal points

In one of our vans, I installed very large pendants over the dining table in what was, by all standards, a very small space. I balanced the size against the fact that the pendants were woven (not solid) and, therefore, visually light.

It can feel counterintuitive to go large in a small space, but creating moments of drama, like in a large-scale pendant, creates focal points and makes the space feel bigger than it is.

The key to working with a small space is to scale up but reduce the quantity of items in the space. For instance, this is not the time to display a collection of vases – one large vase will have more impact. Similarly, avoid hanging a gallery of small art pieces and instead have fewer large-scale art pieces.

As well as tricking the eye, you’ll enjoy simply not having to manoeuvre around clutter in your tight space.

Ready to renovate a caravan? Find tips, tricks and inspiration from Michael and Carlene Duffy in their book ‘This Old Van: Plan, Renovate and Style Your Own Vintage Caravan’.