I was in the market for a camper van. I looked at old Vanagons (so expensive in America), school buses (where will I park that in San Francisco), trucks, (sorry planet) then I discovered the Honda Element. It was 4WD, seemed reliable (Honda) and I discovered this amazing company called Ursa Minor that made pop up tents for them. There are hundreds of people modifying them with sleeping platforms and the like, so it seemed like the perfect car for me. I bought a 2008 dark red one, and called him Owlburt.

Rather than permanently mount a Ursa Minor bed conversion I settled on a roof top tent. I liked the build quality and it offered more flexibility. It sits on your roof rack on top of your car, and folds down to an aerodynamic shell, a bit like a luggage box.

The Maggiolina

I had a custom memory foam topper added, and I couldn’t be happier with it. I store my duvet, pillows, and sheets on the bed when its shut. So when I’m ready for a nap. I just open it up (4 seconds)and jump right in.

Now I have a nice place to sleep that can drive places. But it’s missing something. A kitchen!

How can i fit a kitchen in?

The Honda has neat folding / fully removable rear seats. I wondered about removing one seat and designing a Vanagon style kitchen to replace it.

Seats folded against the wall. (they are removable too)

Plenty of space then to fit everything in, but I worried about the side airbags, and losing one of my passenger seats.

Space behind the seats.

Nope. Time to be practical. It’s going to have to fit behind the rear seats. Now that that was decided, now I had to figure out how to do it.

Design Goals

I made a list of what I wanted in my ultimate car kitchen.

Two Burner Stove with gas supply — oven would be nice.

Fridge / Freezer

Integrated power supply / inverter that will run the fridge for 4 days +

Sink / water tank

Storage space for dry goods, cups, pots, pans, plates etc…

Removable and should not require any permanent modification to the car.

Fits behind rear seats of car.

Something I can actually build that won’t spontaneously deconstruct.

That seemed like quite a lot to fit in a fairly small space in the back of the car. Step one seemed to be to get some accurate measurements.

Make a form

After getting my tape measure out and looking at the back of the car, it quickly became clear to me accurate measurements would make or break this project. They were also surprisingly hard to obtain. The rear of the car had lots of complicated shapes and angles for the form I wanted to make:

This was roughly the shape that would give me the maximum volume for kitchen. But it was very hard to measure accurately. Even though it takes just seconds to sketch.

Before I put hours into learning CAD, or cutting wood. I knew I had to get this right, and even after measuring and measuring again. I wasn’t confident. So I decided to make a prototype form. I figured I could find / buy some sort of connector for dowel, similar to the ones used by Kites, and make a quick cheap frame with those and wooden dowel. I tried to find these connectors everywhere. I could not find them.

So I 3d printed some! First time I’ve done that, and it worked great. I used a service provided by Thingyverse — waited a week, and then I had my connectors!

My first use-case for 3d printing. My own connectors!

Now I could cut some cheap dowel to fit. Make a prototype form and be sure all the measurements were correct:

The prototype form cut out and in place in the car, held together with my 3d printed connectors. This step was fundamental in making sure my later work would fit and be removable from the car.

The prototype form back in the house, before the cat destroyed it.

Now I had a form I could accurately measure, and then try and figure out how I was going to fit everything into it.

Source the main parts…

I needed to decide on the main items for the kitchen so I knew what I was going to be working with size wise. I spent a lot of time researching each item, both for cost and durability, and I’m really happy with what I ended up with: