Luxury travel trailer manufacturer Bowlus is back this summer, with another spectacularly custom fuselage-inspired design that’s tailor made for memory-making.
The Road Chief Endless Highways takes off where the first Road Chief broke ground. The nifty, glimmering, bullet-shaped aluminum camper suggests classic Airstream designs, but with an even stronger affiliation with early aircraft styling; the streamline moderne shape comes right out of the pre-war era.
So, in point of fact, it was probably Bowlus who inspired Airstream. The founder of the company—one W.H. Bowlus—was an aircraft designer before he embarked on a career building earthbound recreation vehicles, and remained one all his life. His early work with gliders informs the Road Chief and its latter-day descendants: efficiency, above all, both inside and out.
The new Bowlus doesn’t fuss with the founder’s design sensibility, but does take the style in a fashionably insouciant direction, working toward a hip individuality that lives even better than it looks, and carries the price tag to prove it: $185K. It’s a remarkably literate reboot, intended for the affluent who wrestles frequently with bouts of luxuriant sentimentality.
The model is essentially an updated version of their Road Chief 26, which first raised the eyebrows of romantic escapists late last year. Thankfully, many of the design elements that made the Road Chief 26 so appealing have carried over into the Road Chief Endless Highways.
The moniker is marvelously expressive, imbuing the trailer with a suggestive quality that anticipates the lifestyle represented by the Road Chief series: the unlimited, and the mystery that arises from the unlimited. In this case, the mystery may be waiting around the next bend, or entirely immune to the arrival of discovery.
The romantic ideal is, of course, up to you.