Whether you call it a caravan, a vardo or a gypsy wagon, I have wanted one for as long as I can remember.

When I was young, my British grandmother used to tell me about the traveler Smiths that lived at the end of her street in the “gypsy camp”. These folks would make all sorts of crafts, and music and sounded like quite the family. The story goes that my grandmothers grandmother was one of these folk, though she lived in a house by the time my grandmother knew her. I am unsure if they were Romany or if that matters much to this story.

As a kid, I would hear these tales of people who could move their house and go on adventures and were big into boxing, horses, and craft work and this sounded great to me. What child wouldn’t want to live in a traveling house really?

Years passed, and my love of making things grew and grew, as did my love of history and very old vehicles. More years passed, and my skills had improved to the point where I felt like I could make most of the things I wanted to in wood and metal, and still I wanted to build a caravan. Not some modern affair, made as quickly and as simply as possible, I wanted to build in the flamboyant ornately carved and embellished style of the late 1800’s. I wanted to heavily paint it with the highly stylized decorative motifs too. I wanted to fill it full of clever built-ins and a woodstove and bed, I wanted to build one of the ornate coach suspensions that have fascinated me for years, I wanted to gold leaf it and add stained glass, and upholstery.

Well, that wouldn’t be possible for many years. Not until I had a shop of my own, and not until the time was right. Still the time wasn’t really right for a full blown Victorian Vardo, but perhaps a scaled down version would scratch the itch and allow me to think about the building of a bigger one in the future. Maybe I could learn most of what I needed by building a smaller “practice” version?

Well, the covid-19 pandemic had me thinking about food supply and I had wanted laying hens for some time. What if I built a mini vardo that would function as a chicken tractor? It wouldn’t have the interior suited to humans, but the outside could still be carved and painted, and capture some of that magic I had visualized for all these years.

The Fanciest Birdhouse in the World - Vardo- part one