What with all this and the generous amount of built-in storage - including deep drawers under the beds - Pyne is aiming at a timeless modernism rather than anything too fashionable, hence ephemeral. He's also aiming at something that feels very solid, and it does, right down to the door knobs. It meets all the UK building regulations for a permanent house, which apart from everything else means lots of insulation, for privacy as well as warmth. (Pyne is keen to point out that there is a double thickness of insulation between the two back-to-back bedrooms). No thin-skinned caravan can match up to this.
"Standard caravans have built-in obsolescence of about ten years, while this has the lifetime of a building," says Pyne. The whole project stems from the fact that he wanted to get himself a superior caravan for a plot on the Essex coast, decided the market had nothing to offer that he wanted, and then realized that if he wanted such a product , then others would too.
Given that it measures 17 metres by 6 (that's roughly 56 feet by 20), giving around 900 square feet of usable floor area, the "mouse" tag is perhaps undeserved - there are plenty of flats around that are smaller. And although that quoted price of £148,000 includes delivery and assembly, it is not exactly cheap. Nonetheless it has a bit of a Tardis-like quality. You're surprised at the amount of space inside. It sits in its semi-industrial landscape, right in front of the factory where it was made - before being rolled out into the daylight like an airship from a hangar. It has presence, its corrugated aluminium cladding shining in the intermittent sunlight. Pyne and Howe have made the two flank walls - but not the ends - rise a little higher than they need to, so as to give the house a bit more scale and a more tectonic quality. One glance, and you know this is an architect-designed home. Beneath the facades, the design cleverness continues. Structural engineers Techniker - one of the brightest young firms of its kind going - have made this a very strong box. Technically, it is a "stressed-skin" structure, like an aircraft.
