I’ve changed my life with a bespoke VW Transporter

Growing up in Germany in the ’70s and ’80s, the daughter of a British army regimental sergeant major, Rhonda Drakeford wanted “to design planes or vehicles, because that’s what I was surrounded by”, says the designer. “I thought I was going to be in the army, I didn’t see a job outside.” 

Her father had different ideas – “my dad was, like, there’s no way you could be in the army” – and so, on the recommendation of a teacher, she applied to Central Saint Martins in London to study graphic design. “I didn’t even really know what it was. I was very naive but I’d always had this problem-solving mind, an interest in the engineering side of things, and that translated really well to design.”

In 2009 she launched the interior design and accessories brand and store Darkroom, in Bloomsbury, with Lulu Roper-Caldbeck. Seven years later this morphed into Studio Rhonda, whose modernist, Bauhaus-influenced interiors (with a penchant for bold, blocky primary colours) have been featured in The World of Interiors, Elle Decoration and The New York Times. In 2022 she redesigned the offices of the London communications firm Zetteler to great acclaim, and now she is working on a temporary space for a charity in Smithfield (“everything has to be second-hand”), a house in Clapton, a record-label office and her first international commission, in Puglia. 

The rear-mounted engine has the added advantage of heating the mattress

But the project currently closest to her heart takes her back to that childhood in Germany where she planned on designing vehicles and spent her holidays camping with her parents. Last summer she bought Velma, a 1988 VW Transporter campervan, and set about reconfiguring it inside and out. “I’ve been thinking about buying one for probably 10 years,” she says. “But it became more serious when I got a dog [Lupo, a Patterdale-Jack Russell cross], because he’s quite tricky. He doesn’t really suit London and he’s very reactive because there’s so much stimulation. I was finding that I was getting out of London a lot more, escaping at weekends when I could, renting shepherd’s huts and heading into the middle of nowhere.”

Dog apart, it’s also a professional choice to enable her to take work on the road. “It means I can be off-grid for a week easily and still be working on my laptop. I find when I get out of London that’s when I get my ideas.”

The VW campervan is, of course, a classic of its kind. It’s been around since the launch of the T1 Transporter in 1950, but less known is the fact that its invention had nothing to do with camping at all. It was born of a sketch by a Dutch businessman, Ben Pon, made after he visited the Volkswagen factory; seeing a van-like vehicle transporting parts made him wonder how the VW Beetle could be adapted for commercial use. 

“VW didn’t do campervans; there were these coach-building companies like Westfalia, Holdsworth and Auto-Sleepers that converted them,” says Drakeford. Her T25/T3 was originally converted by Auto-Sleepers and was the last VW camper model to have a rear-mounted engine like the Beetle. The third incarnation of the VW camper, it is much more angular than the bubble-shaped earlier design that became synonymous with hippy culture in the 1960s. “All modern vehicles are getting more and more sort of blobby, and I like that simple [silhouette] as if it’s drawn like a child, in a way. T3s are affectionately known as ‘bricks’ in the community,” she says.

When I get out of London, that’s when I get my ideas

Painted white, the van was in pretty good shape when Drakeford bought it, but with the help of VW specialist customiser Slaughter House Customs in Haywards Heath she has redesigned it to suit her – and her dog’s – specific needs. “I’m creating this for me, so I can make radical decisions in a way that other people might think, ‘That’s crazy.’” The van already had a high-top fixed roof rather than a pop-top (“less faff”) so she can stand up straight when inside; Slaughter House restored the bodywork, added a solar panel and installed Drakeford’s own interior. She contemplated having the power-train converted to electric, but that would have cost around £50,000, and the advantage of the rear-mounted engine is that “it heats up the mattress [stowed above it] as well”. 

Before designing the storage and kitchen, she bought all the plates, pots, pans and other camping accessories that she’d need and configured the interior around them. The cooking unit that slides out through the side door to create an outdoor kitchen is the result of a commission by the furniture store Aram, who asked 10 designers to use the Meccano-like modular furniture of Swiss brand USM to create something that would improve their work lives. As Drakeford notes, one of the downsides of an internal cooker is that “if you have a fry-up, you can smell it for two weeks”. The cabinets, meanwhile, are finished with a thin skin of “micro-cement” coloured with different pigments, which “gives you a lovely cloudy finish”. There’s a small fridge but no sink (“you can’t wash up anything in something that small, so I have a big bowl and do it outside”), while the Portaloo and shower are housed in a “Tardis-like” tent. 

The exterior is a nod to her military upbringing. “I really leaned into the toughness of the exterior, its angularity,” she says. “I’m a complete pacifist but I’m really fascinated by military vehicles. You know when you’re on a motorway, and the convoy will go past, and there are these bonkers-looking machines on wheels, essentially. They’re just purely practical and they’ve got this matte paint finish.” The van is finished in military-grade Raptor paint; in a further nod to her obsession with shipping containers, its colour is rust red (“I literally went around service stations checking the colour of containers against my RAL cards”). She then added Bauhaus pops of primary colour, with a blue roof rack, signal-red wing mirrors and a yellow ladder on the back. 

Drakeford is planning her first big trip with Velma to the Alps this summer – and who knows where it will then take her professionally. “It’s like, have van, will travel,” she says. “Maybe it will open up a whole world of international clients. Go park up in some drive somewhere and spend the summer doing someone’s house.” 

Conversion by slaughterhousecustoms.com. To hire the van, contact studio-rhonda.com