IWANA Life
How the Landscape Learned to Breathe
How the Landscape
Learned to Breathe
The Landscape was born from years of looking, travelling, sleeping in small spaces, and asking one stubborn question: how could a tiny teardrop feel beautifully open?
This is the story of how old magazines, American roads, Cape Town light, safaris, one leaking wooden trailer and two women obsessed with design slowly turned into the idea that would become the IWANA Landscape.
After that little 1939 magazine planted the first seed in our heads, teardrop trailers somehow kept finding us. Or maybe we kept finding them.
Over the years, while travelling through the United States and Canada, Ana and I became slightly obsessed with them. Big ones. Tiny ones. Vintage ones. Homemade ones. Beautifully restored ones. Strange ones. Different shapes. Different proportions. We looked at every single one like designers pretending not to work.
But even when we loved them, there was usually something we still wanted from them. More air. More light. A little more beauty. A little more calm. A little less feeling like you were closing yourself inside a small hard shell and a little more feeling like you were still connected to where you had parked.
Then we arrived in Cape Town.
I still don’t quite know how to explain that city properly. The ocean. That enormous mountain rising behind it. The colours. The light. Beautiful buildings beside wild landscapes. Art everywhere. It felt almost staged, as if somebody had designed the whole place as a movie set and forgotten to yell cut.
Something in us relaxed there. And when you relax, you notice more. Not only what is beautiful — but what is missing. That matters a lot when you’re designing anything.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, there it was.
A fibreglass teardrop. Delicate. Rounded. Curvaceous. But still somehow strong. I remember circling it and thinking: oh. This was different. It had a softness to it that most small campers didn’t have. It felt less boxed in, less heavy, more graceful.
That question stayed with us: what if a tiny trailer could feel calm and open instead of cramped? What if the emotion of the space mattered just as much as the practicality of it?
We were not interested in making something bigger just for the sake of it. We wanted to make something better.
We came home. But our heads didn’t really come back with us.
After safaris. After mountain lookouts. After elephants who suddenly felt like close friends. After spaces so open they changed the way you breathed. We came back to Sydney and kept designing in our heads.
At that point we still had our handsome little wooden teardrop. We loved it. It had already taught us a lot. But one stormy night the rain found its way inside. By morning, we were wet. And laughing. Sometimes there is really nothing else to do.
But it made something obvious. We had spent years noticing where the air moved and where it didn’t, how low a roof could feel, how much a tiny detail could change a whole experience. We didn’t only want a cute trailer. We wanted a beautifully solved one.
Make it small. Make it light. And somehow make it feel huge.
We didn’t just want ventilation. We wanted the cabin to breathe. Windows positioned so air could move across the interior. Doors that opened the room directly into the campsite. A taller internal volume so warm air wasn’t sitting immediately above your face. Built‑in fans. Better light. Better proportion. And above all, a roof that didn’t stop at shelter.
That was the real beginning of the Landscape. Not a styling exercise. Not a trend. A design response to a feeling we kept chasing.
We didn’t just want ventilation. We wanted the cabin to breathe.
The stargazer was never only about stars. It was about volume. Light. Relief. That beautiful sense that the room continued above you instead of stopping abruptly at the ceiling.
Then came the rest: more airflow, two-side access, a taller interior, soft curves, and a layout that felt calm rather than cluttered. We were protecting the teardrop silhouette, not stretching it until it became something else.
Small outside. Something else entirely inside.
Small outside. Surprisingly big inside.
What emerged was not a bigger teardrop, but a more open one — a trailer that tries to stay connected to the place where you park it.
Panoramic stargazer
A bigger view of a wilder world, directly above the bed.
More airflow
Openings positioned to help air move naturally across the cabin.
Two-side access
More ease getting in and out, and more connection to the campsite.
Taller, calmer interior
A small room that feels generous instead of compressed.
Looking back, I don’t think Ana and I were ever designing just a trailer. We were designing a feeling: shoes off, doors open, something cooking outside, a little music, maybe wine, maybe coffee, your favourite person beside you, and the sense that even in a very small space, there is still room to breathe.
The Landscape started with old inspiration, wandered through North America, sharpened itself in South Africa, survived a leaking wooden teardrop, and eventually became a little cabin that opens itself back to the world.
