Photos: Combining #tinyhouses and #vanlife, housetruckers in the 1970s got around in cozy style
This domestic transportation lifestyle predates Instagram
Forget #Vanlife. Your tiny house? Sell it. Before those bespoke paperweights of mobile domesticity were popularized, intrepid traveling folk from New York to New Zealand were getting road-cozy in reclaimed diesel trucks outfitted with multi-room cabins. And they did it with wood fired stoves and no internet.
Housetrucks were first popularized in the 1960s and 1970s, part of a growing international counterculture with origins in the Bay Area, but the spirit of the open road. Hippies sought freedom in many forms, but going rent-free was the lynchpin of a life less ordinary. Customized vehicles were seen as a path toward uninhibited nomadism and communal living—a far cry from the precious self-interest of today’s Instagram hippies. Unsurprising, then, that housetruck culture would reach its zenith in New Zealand, where island vibes created a leisurely pace and relaxed atmosphere around traffic laws. Other factors contributed to the proliferation of homemade RVs there in the 1970s, including an uptick in car ownership (automobile shipping crates doubled as ready-made boxes of the appropriate size and shape for housetrucking) and the widespread reclamation of timber—and vehicles—from aging colonial-era farm houses.
Today the housetruck culture lives on, thanks to the sturdiness of its vehicles and its embrace by a new generation of nomads yearning for the innocence of yesteryear and a dream born nearly half a century ago.
