Jay Nelson felt the spark the moment he finished his first one. “In my mind it was such a hit,” he says. “I felt like I had made something super functional, and I kind of amazed myself. It inspired me to keep going down that path and to explore other ways of building campers.”

At the time, Nelson had recently graduated from art school, and he was drawing, painting, and living in the attic above Mollusk Surf Shop in San Francisco’s Sunset District. He felt isolated living alone and wanted to travel, so in 2007 he took a totaled ’91 Honda Civic CRX that he’d bought for $200 and retrofitted it into an escape pod. “I wanted to get out, so I built a little camper that I could take on surf trips—a temporary home,” he says.

In the years since, he has worked on 16 vehicles, including two boats, trucks of various sizes, and a Subaru Brat with a wood-burning stove. He has also built tree houses, gallery interiors to exhibit his artwork, and even an entire home. In 2014 he built a 200-square-foot reclaimed-wood cabin in Hawaii. “I’ve been lucky,” he says. “I’ve had really good clients who just let me do my thing.”

Mobile or stationary, Nelson’s structures reflect the work of an artist. He builds the campers as small as possible, with careful attention to proportion—the shape of each camper responds to the body of the vehicle, just as the form of each tree house is defined by the tree. He loves curves and round windows, and he often incorporates recycled materials, “because when I started I never had money,” he says. “Now it’s more for environmental reasons—I just can’t stand going to lumberyards, and there’s so much incredible waste out there.”

“I really try to push myself into unknown territory on every project. That’s how I always approach my art—I never want to repeat myself.”
—Jay Nelson

It’s 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and Nelson is jet-lagged as he opens the door. He’s just returned from a family trip to Bali, where he caught waves, had a close shave with a sharp reef, and oversaw the design of several new buildings for Uluwatu Surf Villas. The 1,000-square-foot home where he lives with his wife, Rachel Kaye, and their two daughters is filled with art, travel mementos, and architectural models. Tiny Blundstone boots lie scattered on the floor, surfboards hang from the rafters, and palm fronds and succulents thrive in a backyard oasis.

Nelson presents a model for a new 1,000-square-foot house he’s designing on Molokai and mentions that he’s working on furniture prototypes as well. He would ideally like to split his time between making paintings and designing and building homes from top to bottom—complete with furnishings, windows, textiles, and light fixtures. “I really want to build every part of the house, so it’s a complete experience, in the same way my campers are a complete experience,” he says. But Nelson doesn’t build many campers for clients these days—he says they’re expensive and time-consuming, and he’s always a little sad that he doesn’t get to keep them.

Later, Nelson grabs a pair of surfboards and loads them into one of his most recent vehicles: a Toyota truck topped with a colorful camper. He went to Nova Scotia with Kaye in his very first camper before they were married. Now, he’s built out the much larger Toyota so that they can travel as a family.

“When I was growing up in the ’80s,” he says, “my parents had a VW van, and we traveled through Europe for a month in it and then shipped it back. I did a lot of camping with my two sisters. Those are my most important memories. That’s just ingrained in me—I want to do that stuff with my kids.”

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