Remembering the Kabe Royal Tower, a Two-Story Luxury Trailer That Wrote History

Google “world’s strangest RV” or anything along those lines, and the image of this two-story trailer is bound to pop up among the first results. Even today, so many years after it was built, it’s still reemerges regularly on dedicated websites and forums. It’s a sort of magical unicorn of the RV industry, but perhaps the most interesting part about it is that it’s real. Or was, depending on how you choose to look at it.

This is called the Kabe Royal Tower, widely believed to be the tallest caravan ever built in Europe. Kabe is a Swedish caravan company that goes all the way back to 1958, when founder Kurt Blomqvist set out to work in his garage to build the perfect caravan for his family. Today, Kabe specializes in caravans and motorhomes of varying sizes and for varying budgets, adapted for the Swedish weather and customizable to a certain degree.

Kabe is a locally esteemed builder that prides itself with high-quality, low-volume work, attention to detail, and a bunch of records, unverified as they are. These include the world’s first two-story caravan in the ‘70s, Europe’s longest caravan with the Imperial Hacienda (11.57 meters / 38 feet), and the tallest caravan ever build in Europe, with the aforementioned Royal Tower.

The Royal Tower was created as a one-off PR exercise, and it proved to be an incredible hit. Announced in 2007, it would only be completed and unveiled the next year, at industry shows around the old continent – and every appearance was a success. Here was a monster of a trailer, sitting at 4.5 meters tall (14.7 feet) and 9.7 meters long (31.8 feet), furnished like a landyacht but fully functional, and with its own private balcony that could host a small outdoor party – or, depending on the case, allow you to work on your tan in complete privacy.

The Royal Tower meant to celebrate 50 years since the company had started, and it sparked incredible interest in the existing models – none of which were two-story, by the way. On the ground floor, it included a kitchen with everything from a four-burner gas stove to a dishwasher, a massive side-by-side, and all the modern appliances necessary, alongside vast amounts of space. A dining room with an equally massive U-shaped couch clad in real leather, and a bedroom with ensuite bathroom rounded up the ground floor layout.

Upstairs was an entertaining lounge that could be anything you needed it to be: an office, a living room, or screening room, or formal entertainment space. This gave way to the private terrace, which was large enough to hold two tanning lounges, and you’d still be left with some space for several people to stand. In total, the Royal Tower offered 26 square meters (279.8 square feet) of living space, with luxury furnishes and finishes, and all the creature comforts of a proper, multi-storied home.

Kabe never went past the production of the one-off unit, for the obvious reasons. While the unit displayed proprietary patented features, like the unique floor heating system, the proprietary plastic joists with embedded air ducts, and the VarioVent ventilation system, it was still too tall to actually work in many real-life scenarios. Stability was probably another issue, as was the price: a reported €105,000 ($108,059 at the current exchange rate), which is a fortune whether by those times or today’s standards.

The concept reemerged a decade later, but under a different name, as Kabe introduced the Imperial Tower in 2017, shown in the video below. Reports online claim that this one was meant as a production unit but the same reasons mentioned above worked against it catching on, so it was discontinued shortly after. The biggest difference between the Royal and the Imperial tower was the living surface, which was larger in the latter. There were some design differences as well, mostly with the interior.

Today, Kabe offers Royal and Imperial models, which are higher-specced and more expensive versions of the Classic model. Not one of their trailers is two-storied, which guarantees the Royal Tower’s place in the history of RV-ing.