The word “beauty” is not often associated with travel trailers. Sure, Airstreams and Bowlus trailers remain as stunning as ever, but the vast majority of travel trailers are boring boxes with only swoop decals as a lame attempt at style. Back in the 1920s, an automotive engineer started building trailers that haven’t been matched since. This 1950 Airfloat Land Yacht is a ridiculously rare piece of art that you can sleep in if you can afford it.
Trailers from the Airfloat Coach Manufacturing Company are a rarity today. They do not show up for sale often and when they do, they tend to be paired with grand asking prices. I’ve seen just two Navigators for sale recently, including one that sold today, and one of them was literally a museum piece. I’ve found another Airfloat for sale and this one might be the most perfect example in existence and even rarer than what sold on Bring a Trailer today.
This 1950 Airfloat Land Yacht is another literal museum piece, and it might be one of the most gorgeous campers to have ever reached production. Even cooler is how it employs inventions from a car engineer of the era.
From Chryslers To Campers
This specific trailer and its painstaking restoration was showcased in the July 2011 issue of Trailer Life magazine. I have a copy of this magazine on hand and it documents the history of the Airfloat Coach Manufacturing Company perhaps better than any website can.
According to Trailer Life, Airfloat was the work of automotive engineer Omar Suttles. In 1929, Suttles took his knowledge from building cars and applied it to create a 12-foot camper trailer. As Trailer Life notes, travel trailers didn’t really have their own category back then. Instead, camping vehicles were largely known as ‘House Cars.’ Suttles couldn’t register his trailer with the Department of Transportation, but he was able to get it registered by the California Auto Club.
While Airstream claims to have created the first self-contained travel trailer, Suttles’s creation comes very close, if not actually beats Airstream by more than a couple of decades. Suttles equipped his trailer with a gasoline engine which generated electricity to power the trailer’s refrigerator and charged the trailer’s batteries for nighttime lighting.
One design element Suttles added was large portholes for windows. This caught the attention of enough people that Suttles decided to put the trailer into production. A year later, trailers were constructed by his 10-man team in his auto shop in California. Somehow, Suttles’s trailer business survived the Great Depression and in 1935, he launched a new trailer under the new brand name of the Airfloat Coach Manufacturing Company.
Trailer Life notes that Suttles had a packed resume from working with Chrysler to being a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers. As such, one of the things Suttles did to make Airfloat stand out was to add automotive technology to campers. One of his innovations was a rounded rooftop with a screened ventilator. When opened, heat would rise up and out of the trailer in the summer. When closed, it kept heat in on cooler days.
In 1942, Suttles joined the ranks of innovators trying to make towing easier on the era’s cars. That year, he launched the 24-foot Commodore Third Wheel trailer. Like some other forward-thinking trailers back then, the Commodore Third Wheel featured a third wheel up front near the tongue. This was designed to take some weight off of the tow vehicle by having the trailer support itself. Airfloat applied third wheels to nearly all of its trailers from 1947 to 1955, advertising them with the slogan “It’s easy on your car.”
The year 1947 also marked when Suttles moved from building his trailers out of Masonite to using aluminum skin like a number of builders were back then. Also notable is Suttles’s accolades. He was a founding member of the Trailer Coach Association, the predecessor to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association. He also built trailers for the military to aid in the World War II effort. These trailers served as temporary housing in San Diego for servicemen and their families.
Trailer Life notes that Airfloat trailers were luxurious affairs and as such, they commanded prices $1,000 to $1,500 more expensive than trailers of similar size. Trailer Life‘s example is the 1951 Airfloat Custom Land Yacht, which was 28 feet long. That trailer was $4,050 ($50,094 today), $729 ($9,017 today) more expensive than a Spartan Mansion, which was nearly two feet longer.
This luxury attracted a lot of attention. One famous Airfloat owner was James Dean, who parked a 1952 Airfloat Land Yacht outside of the set for the drama Giant. Airfloat trailers would also serve as the inspiration for the book The Long, Long, Trailer by Clinton “Buddy” Twiss.
Airfloat celebrated its silver anniversary in 1955 and the company celebrated by having all future trailers covered in gold-colored anodized aluminum. Suttles would sell the company in 1956 to Peter J. Bonin and enter retirement. Peter said he wanted to launch nationwide distribution of the trailers, but production ended just a year later.
This Airfloat
Some see Airfloat trailers as the holy grail of vintage trailers. They carry a gorgeous style and are rare enough that if you miss the sale of one, you might have to wait a while before you see another. And while countless trailers through history have been built like crap, Airfloat went for quality.
As the story goes, Peter and Linda Valia found this trailer in a mobile home park where it was sitting and rotting for 50 years. The trailer had been sitting for so long it was still shod in its factory tires from 1950. Peter hitched the trailer to his truck, took it home, and started a restoration project.
As Trailer Life writes, Peter hadn’t ever restored a trailer before, but he was a building contractor, so building stuff was up his alley. When business slowed down, Peter worked on the trailer. After 10 months, Peter had the aluminum exterior wonder restored to immaculate shape. But even better is the fact that the Valias restored the trailer to actually use as a camper, so the restoration also included some modern equipment.
The description attached to this trailer is as follows:
As you get closer, you will notice how clean and well done everything is as you see things like all new plumbing and electrical. The sleeping area features two new comfortable single beds with additional storage available underneath. Other interior features include new wood flooring, in-floor wine bottle compartment, new heater, and new toilet in the bathroom.
This 4940 pound trailer also has a new grey water tank and external sewage pump for safe and easy disposal of waste. At first glance you will notice its iconic aluminum and teal green exterior with round port windows. This is a single axle trailer and has matching Teal Green steel wheels with polished beauty rings. The exterior roof has been treated with Killz coating giving it extra protection from the elements. If plan on hauling this trailer we would recommend upgrading the undercarriage and maybe even a heavy duty axle, spring and suspension. Currently a display piece of history in our amazing collection.
The interior has been completely redone and it shows and you look close at the wood and the polished aluminum that covers every inch of the interior. The inside is very comfortable and has plenty of storage space with large cupboards and drawers throughout. The interior houses new appliances such as a fridge, freezer, microwave, sink, stove with new aluminum back splash and fresh Granite countertop. The sleeping area features two new comfortable single beds with additional storage available.
This trailer has gone on to win awards at shows, be featured in Trailer Life, and it was featured in Caravan Times and other publications. The trailer was then put into a museum collection for a decade. As you’ve probably noticed, the trailer’s third wheel has been removed.
What I like about this restoration is the fact that the modern equipment isn’t in your face. Sure, the toilet looks new, but it doesn’t break the illusion that you’re sleeping in a trailer from 1950. I also love the in-floor wine bottle compartment, which is accessible via the floor hatch in front of the stove. It’s noted that the whole trailer is 28 feet long, while the living space is 24 feet of that.
To give you an idea of what these trailers are worth, an Airfloat Navigator, which is just 20 feet long, sold for $21,998. Another Navigator sold on Bring a Trailer today for $22,750. I’ve seen these larger Land Yachts for $52,000, $65,000, and sometimes higher. The seller for this Airfloat wants $95,000 for it, which sounds like a ton of money because it is. That’s more expensive than the few other Land Yachts I’ve seen.
Yet, at the same time, this one is probably the nicest Airfloat Land Yacht in existence, so maybe it’s worth the price? Either way, this trailer is a piece of art that I cannot stop looking at. If you buy this thing, prepare for any trip to take exponentially longer because everyone is going to want to talk to you about it.
(Images: Backinthedayclassics, unless otherwise noted.)
Meh, RVs are intrinsically ugly because they’re idiotic, and this one looks like a cybertruck to boot.
Wow, these are beautiful! I like the history and innovative features for the time. Giant is a good movie to watch, at least once…since it’s so long…but it’s interesting. It was James Dean’s last movie before he passed
$95k is a lot of money, but it should hold it’s value if you take care of it. Unlike the brand new garbage that falls apart in 3 years and loses about 50% of its value the minute you pull it off the dealers lot.
Based on the crap RV’s built today, this strikes me as a bargain. I have an original framed print ad for a 48foot Air float trailer featuring indoor plumbing hanging on my office wall. Circa 1954ish. Keep up you’re amazing work Mercedes. I think these trailers still featured the port holes well into the late 50’s. I haven’t found evidence of a 10 foot wide version though. I’ll search my extensive CD archives….One of my child hood fellow trailer freaks scanned all of the brochures, etc, we had during our lifetime and left them to me In his will, he left me all of this info in outdated digital format. Yes, my VCR still works, as does my 8 track player, and thankfully the CD on my old laptop.. I literally have over 3000k old ads in outdated digital format. Would be thrilled to share. He was especially fond of the 50’s two story trailer movement, as was I!
What I love about this is all the wood and portholes makes it feel like you’re in a 2nd Class cabin aboard the old Queen Mary.
Nowadays, trailer interiors are more reminiscent of Barbie’s Dream House Flip: All gray and white, cardboard and plastic.
When I look at so many designs like this one from 60 – 80 years ago, and then look at rectangular cubes that serve as RVs today, it makes me sad. This is not the most aerodynamic, but at least the rear end has some curvature. Kudos to Bowlus, Airstream and others for ensuring that the operating cost of trailers is taken into account during the design stage.
It’s certainly a classic, but I feel like $95k is a bit (a lot?) of a stretch.
All that wood and aluminum and the guy installs countertops salvaged from the Home Depot closeout pile. He really is a general contractor.
I would have gone with cracked ice Formica with chrome edges, personally, but, I guess it works
I see a lot of beauty in function, but IDK if I can go along with calling that gorgeous. It’s a quonset hut on wheels. And I love quonset huts, but I would never call them gorgeous. No matter how well trimmed the interior is.
That is gorgeous and, considering what people pay for RVs made out of landfill material in a manner matching the quality of the materials, it doesn’t seem unreasonably expensive to me. This is like a professionally restored old wood Chris Craft or Century vs a new Pro Line or Bayliner.
While I have no interest in RVs or campers and the whole idea of traveling in them is kind of horrifying to me (except this one—this one I get), I very much enjoy reading your articles about the weirdos, the especially egregious junkers, and the beauties like this.
Imagine waking up to the sun streaming through the porthole onto the lush paneling. Talk about morning wood!
You’re gonna need to keep your wood polished…
…frequently.
Don’t come a knockin if this trailer is rockin! ????
Serious question: can we determine whether this is the first broadly(?)-used instance of the term “land yacht”?
It’s been part of the automotive slang lexicon for ages, often used to describe the 40ft-long two-door monstrosities of the early/mid 1970s, but I wonder if the term was in use before 1950.
The earliest use of the term might be in the 1941 comedy film Sullivan’s Travels
Wow. That is a beautiful RV. Definitely what I would consider a “work of art”.
https://hagerty-hdc-production.imgix.net/61ff27a6-6dec-4428-a260-2cce13730b08.jpeg
Elvis is in the wrong RV.