The Future, As They Imagined It
Why the design of Trailorboat #132 feels so familiar to me
Before I knew who made the Trailorboat, how rare it was, or anything about its history, I knew exactly what I was looking at. Those curves. The side spear. The sculpted wheel wells. The tiny windows. And that completely ridiculous silhouette created by putting a boat on top of a camper. It was the future. Not our future. Their future. The future imagined by people living in an America surrounded by tailfins and jet aircraft, watching rockets launch toward space and suddenly experimenting with materials like fiberglass that could be molded into almost any shape a designer could dream up. And I have always loved that future.
I grew up near Reno, where Hot August Nights transforms the entire city every summer. It isn't just a car show. For a few weeks, the radio stations change. The music changes. The streets fill with chrome, tailfins, wild colors and cars that look like they were designed by people who believed transportation should make an entrance.
As a kid, I didn't always appreciate it. In fact, each summer when Hot August Nights rolled into town, I can remember getting tired of hearing the same old music everywhere we went. It was like a month and a half of Christmas music- just before Christmas. But as I got older, and went away to college, I realized how much of it had become part of what made home feel like home. Now, when I go back during Hot August Nights, I love that the whole city seems to slip into another era for a while.
My fascination with mid-century design really exploded when I was about 21 and living in Arlington Towers in downtown Reno. It was this fabulous 1960s high-rise with its own connections to the world I had grown up around. The Harrah family of Harrah’s Casino owned a spectacular penthouse next door to mine. Theirs was Apartment I, mine was Apartment K. Both of our units looked over downtown Reno, and in particular, this tiny building across the street with a huge parking lot, which also belonged to the Harrah family. Bill Harrah's influence was everywhere in Reno. He had assembled one of the most extraordinary automobile collections in the country, and some of the older residents in the building would share stories of celebrities and members of the Rat Pack coming to town, staying in the Harrah penthouse, looking out over the balcony, and choosing one of his cars from the lot below to drive around town while they were visiting.
So even where I lived had this connection to classic cars, old Reno glamour and the design of that era. But one of the people who really changed the way I looked at design was another neighbor who lived two doors down- in Apartment J. He had worked for Hanna-Barbera on The Jetsons. As an artist, I was fascinated by him, and through that friendship I started paying attention to things I hadn't really noticed before: ashtrays, toasters, furniture, appliance emblems, light fixtures, signs—even the shape of a handle or the typography on something nobody else would bother looking at twice.
Suddenly I could see how much thought had gone into everyday objects. That period of design fascinates me because people were being handed entirely new materials and technologies and essentially being told, Okay, now what can you do with this? Fiberglass could curve. Acrylic could glow. Concrete could become sculptural. New manufacturing techniques allowed designers to make shapes that had been difficult or impossible before. And America was obsessed with movement. Cars borrowed from airplanes. Buildings borrowed from rockets. Signs exploded into stars and boomerangs. Tailfins got higher. Windshields wrapped around corners. Even ordinary household objects started looking like they might blast off.
So when I saw #132, I didn't sit down afterward and decide to compare her to old cars. I saw the cars already in her. The side spear immediately reminded me of the dramatic body lines running through late-1950s and early-1960s Chevrolets. Her rear corners have the same confidence as the tailfin era, even though they aren't literal fins. The wheel openings aren't simply holes cut into a flat trailer wall; they're sculpted into the fiberglass body. Then there are those tiny windows and all those molded curves that make the entire thing feel more like a vehicle than a box someone put on wheels. Put Splashdown on top and the profile changes completely. Suddenly the boat isn't cargo sitting on a trailer. It completes the shape.
That last part may be my favorite thing about the entire design. Take Splashdown off and Stargazer is a tiny fiberglass camper. Put her back on top and the two objects become one. Somebody actually had to sit there and solve the problem of carrying a camper and a boat together, and instead of treating the boat as something awkward that needed to be strapped onto the roof, they made it part of the silhouette. Function creates form.
The idea wasn't entirely without precedent. Decades earlier, designs like the 1937 Arrowhead Teardrop had already explored the idea that function, aerodynamics and appearance could all become part of the same object. But by the time the Trailorboat appeared, the materials and visual language had changed. Fiberglass gave designers the freedom to create compound curves and molded forms that traditional trailer construction couldn't easily reproduce.
And that leads to another part of this story I absolutely love: the fiberglass. Most people hear “early fiberglass car” and immediately think Corvette. But if Hot August Nights taught me anything, it was that the Corvette wasn't the beginning of that story. Before it came Bill Tritt’s Boxer and the Glasspar G2. Tritt was a Southern California boatbuilder based in Costa Mesa, California.
And if you thought the Trailorboat Engineering Company was a deep rabbit hole—no, no. I invite you to explore an entirely different rabbit hole: the Glasspar Corporation.
Tritt was experimenting with fiberglass when the material itself was still relatively new to consumers. Before that, much of its development had been driven by industrial and military applications. Sometime between 1937 and 1942, pioneer Ray Greene built an early fiberglass-composite boat hull, although he didn't mass-produce them. Then, in 1950, Charles and Ray Eames introduced their iconic fiberglass shell chairs. But it was Bill Tritt who, in the late 1940s, began using postwar fiberglass and resin to build lightweight, rot-resistant boats. He also realized that techniques used to mold fiberglass boat hulls could be applied to automobile bodies, eventually leading to the Glasspar G2, one of America's pioneering production fiberglass-bodied sports cars—before the Corvette made fiberglass automobiles familiar to a much wider audience. Sadly, Tritt's place in that history has largely been overshadowed by the Corvette. Remember, he was a boatbuilder. Of course a boatbuilder could help push fiberglass into cars. But Chevrolet had something Tritt didn't: the resources to mass-produce and market a fiberglass automobile on an entirely different scale.
Fast forward more than seventy years, and here I am in 2026, about to begin restoring a fiberglass camper built by a company that also built boats.
That's the connection that fascinates me. These weren't completely separate design worlds. Boats, cars, campers, architecture and industrial design were borrowing materials, shapes and ideas from one another. Look inside a Glasspar G2 and you can see its boatbuilding DNA. Look at a Trailorboat and you're seeing that same kind of experimentation applied to recreation: a molded fiberglass camper and a molded fiberglass boat designed to become one object when they're traveling down the road. The Trailorboat makes more sense when you stop looking at it as simply an old camping trailer and start looking at the design world that produced it.
It also explains why I don't want to restore #132 by pretending nothing has happened since the early 1960s. The goal of this project has never been to pretend it's still 1962. For some restorers, returning something as closely as possible to the day it left the factory is the goal, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I want to preserve what survived, understand what was original before I change anything, and make sure the important pieces of her history remain visible. But the Trailorboat itself came from an era obsessed with experimentation and the future. To me, freezing it permanently in the past would almost miss the point. So I'm approaching the restoration by asking a different question: If the future they imagined had kept evolving, what might #132 look like now?
That's where the teal metallic glitter and pearl white come from. I want colors that have a relationship with the period without simply copying a factory color chart. Teal can belong to the water, the sky, a 1950s kitchen, a custom car and a music festival all at once. The pearl white gives it some elegance, while the metallic finish lets the fiberglass do something it was always meant to do—catch light and show off those curves. I'm even considering adding custom chrome molding that plays off the existing side spear rather than fighting it. And now we have 3-D printers—something that puts us one step closer to the world of The Jetsons. Why wouldn't I use that technology and play with what I can create? I want the finished design to feel familiar enough that you can see where it came from, but different enough that you know this isn't an attempt to freeze #132 at a single moment in time.
The same philosophy will carry inside. Would I love to find the perfect vintage refrigerator? Absolutely. Would I love it after five days at a music festival when it decides it no longer feels like refrigerating my food? Absolutely not.
So I'll use modern equipment where modern equipment makes sense, but I can design around it. A modern refrigerator can live inside cabinetry or paneling that feels appropriate to the camper. A vintage gas stove or oven, on the other hand, may be perfectly practical because those things are relatively simple and repairable. I don't think preserving something means I have to make myself miserable using it, and I don't think modernization has to mean ripping its history out either.
I'm especially excited about the floor because I'm designing it myself. Since the interior is basically four feet by eight feet, I can create a completely custom vinyl floor without needing the giant budget that would come with covering a much larger space. I want the colors and geometry to feel like they belong in the period, but I don't want to reproduce somebody else's vintage pattern. It should be something new that feels like it could have existed. And because I am me, there may be something hidden in the floor that people have to find. Wink wink. I love Easter eggs. I love details that reward someone for looking a little closer, and #132 gives me an entire tiny world where I can do that.
That's really what I want the entire restoration to become. I don't want someone to walk up to #132 when she's finished and think, Wow, they did a great job making that look exactly like it did sixty years ago. I want them to recognize where she came from and then start noticing what changed. I want someone who loves old cars to see the side spear. Someone who loves architecture might notice the geometry. I want someone familiar with the Glasspar G2 to sit inside Splashdown and immediately see the connection. I want someone who knows the history of fiberglass to recognize the relationship between boats and those early fiberglass sports cars. And I want someone at a music festival to think the teal glitter looks fucking fabulous. All of those reactions can exist at the same time.
Because the future people imagined in the early 1960s obviously isn't the future we got. We don't yet commute in flying cars. Our houses don't look like The Jetsons—well, most of ours at least—and most of us aren't spending our weekends towing tiny fiberglass spaceships with boats molded into their roofs. But I don't think that's why their version of the future still fascinates us. They weren't predicting it. They were designing toward it. They were looking at new materials, new technology and a rapidly changing world and asking what else might be possible. Sometimes the answer was practical. Sometimes it was ridiculous. Sometimes it was beautiful. And every once in a while, somebody decided the future of camping needed a boat on the roof. More than sixty years later, I get to decide what happens next. I don't want to erase the future they imagined. I want to see what it looks like when that future keeps going. And I am a part of it.
-Oxean
