A Polish hotel chain has a neat solution to old, rusty semi truck trailers littering the country. Instead of sleeping in a regular hotel, Good Spot wants you to sleep in an old semi truck trailer that it turned into a tiny house.
Weird travel accommodations have been around for a while. Look outside of your traditional list of hotels and you can sleep in everything from a Boeing 747 to a converted taxi van parked on a street in New York City. These strange places to lay your head are gaining traction, notes vacation rental company Airbnb. Even I recently kicked the regular hotel to the curb and stayed at a bed and breakfast. As Dwell reports, a new hotel company, Good Spot seeks to attract travelers with old refrigerated semi truck trailers converted into hotel rooms.
Good Spot founder Roman Sokolowski saw an opportunity to repurpose some old trailers while offering travelers a place to stay off-grid. He partnered up with Polish design firm, Znamy się to build them out into tiny homes. The firm says that the old refrigerator trailers came from other places, having been imported into Poland just to end up abandoned, making the country a trailer graveyard.
Perhaps the most obvious change in the overhaul is an outer skin of stainless steel. It’s a striking finish and reminds me a bit of classic American travel trailers.
Inside, Good Spot says that the trailers have layouts “based on solutions typical of camper vans, where all functions are located around the perimeter as a way to maximize space in a small area.”
The resulting tiny house looks plenty roomy and open, despite being confined to the width of a semi trailer.
And it’s not just a room—you get a kitchen and a bathroom, too. Check out the waterfall shower head in the bathroom.
It’s unclear how these trailers get power, water or how they dump waste. The folks at Business Insider interviewed Sokolowski and note that the team that makes these trailers wants to make a model that’s completely self-sustainable with solar power and water collected from the rain.
Sokolowski says that using refrigerated trailers as a base cuts production time and costs. The trailers are already insulated and they’re cheap, being in a huge supply as they’re always getting retired. Of course, since they’re still very much trailers, they can be moved to wherever the hot spot for the season is. It also means that they can be parked in remote areas where you wouldn’t find any other accommodations.
Good Spot already has four floorplans with: twin, standard, accessibility, and single. The company is even brewing up a restaurant trailer.
The twin gets you sleeping for two in a small 183 square foot unit, while the rest are 355 square feet. The standard can sleep a family of six and the accessibility sleeps five. As you could probably guess, a single sleeps four. Those larger units cost about $80,000 to build.
The trailers are currently being used in two seasonal locations and Sokolowski notes that they were booked out through the summer and making money. A stay currently costs $50 to $150, which sounds cooler than staying in a tiny room in a big hotel. Sadly, Good Spot is only in Europe for now. But it does have plans to build and sell the trailers as regular tiny homes in the future.
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