A map of the fair

Somewhere on the second day in Düsseldorf I stopped looking at vans and drew a square on a napkin. Designers do this. It is how we avoid talking to salespeople.

Two lines through the middle. Left to right: how far the thing can actually go. Bottom to top: how much you would want to live in it once it got there. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon putting every van I had seen into one of the four boxes.

Bottom left filled up fast. Vans that go nowhere in particular and are nothing in particular once they get there. Most of the fair, honestly. Competent, sensible, the same layout in a slightly different grey. Bed at the back, kitchen in the middle, bathroom opposite, unchanged since before I could drive. Well made, some of them. Just not made with any question in mind.

Top left is the luxury hall. Morelo and its neighbours. The finish is genuinely superb and I do not say that lightly, I ran my hand over a lot of it. But these are houses with an engine. They weigh what a small bus weighs and they are welcome exactly where a small bus is welcome. All the comfort in the world, delivered to a campsite with a hook-up.

Bottom right is the four-wheel-drive hall. Snorkels, sand tyres, a roof rack that could carry a second van. They will take you to the end of the road and past it. Then you open the door and it is a bench, a plastic sink, and the unspoken assumption that anyone who wanted to go that far did not also want a decent bed when they arrived.

Top right. Goes anywhere. A room you would be proud of when it gets there.

Nothing. Not one van, at the biggest caravan fair on earth. I checked twice, because an empty square on a napkin is either a business or a delusion, and it is worth knowing which.

Everyone in the industry knows the square is there. They will tell you, kindly, why it stays empty. Weight — a proper interior is heavy, and a four-wheel-drive chassis has no patience for heavy. Certification. Cost. The two customers are supposedly different people. All true, more or less. I have spent two years and most of what I own finding out exactly how true.

But an obstacle nobody has cleared is not the same as an obstacle that cannot be cleared. That distinction is the only thing I have that the fair does not.

Ānanya is a vehicle for the empty square. That is the whole brief and always was. The finish of the top-left hall, on a chassis from the bottom-right hall, built by Robeta in Slovenj Gradec, who are as good at the finish as anyone in Düsseldorf and were curious enough to come into the empty square with me.

It is not finished. In January it will be standing in Stuttgart, and you will be able to decide for yourself which of the two things an empty square turned out to be.

I know which one I am betting on. I have the napkin.

Ānanya. The world's first GlamperVan.