Luxury by Nature Tenthome (1999)
Renée Schuffelers
1999
Supervisory Team
Jim Hennessey
Kees Nauta
Alex Visser
De Waard Tenten
Piet de Waard
Willem van Schie
Tent company, De Waard, had a history of tent innovation. Their original Albatros model had been the first virtually stormproof tent back in 1946. By 1998, De Waard was renting out tents for organised cycle holidays. What could be their next step?
Schuffelers decided to combine the service level of a ready-made tent with the comfort of a real home. Her design featured kitchen and bathroom units, separate bedrooms, a solid floor and several outdoor terraces. Her elegant, flower-shaped dwelling allowed holiday makers to get back to nature, minus the wobbly airbeds and muddy floors.
Schuffelers’s tent was designed to be set up for the season, meaning happy campers no longer had to face assembling ‘A’ frames and hammering in tent pegs at dusk. You only had to pack your bags and go. As the term glamping didn’t appear until around 2007, this was true glamping avant la lettre.
Watch the interview:
(English subtitles available)
360° Experience:
Late 20th century tourists wanted to get back to nature. But as much as they sought adventure, these ‘Lonely Planet’ readers also craved comfort. An exciting paradox!
One source of inspiration was the yurt, the round tents covered in skins or felt that are used as dwellings by nomadic people in Central Asia.
The idea of connecting people back to nature, as explored by Schuffelers, is here to stay. Traditional dwellings - from tipis to treehouses - are being reimagined and made accessible to city dwellers, divorced from nature in their daily lives.
