Andreas Stavropoulos is a man on the go. Each day he wakes up inside the 1959 Airstream trailer that he bought from a collector, retrofitted, and now calls home. He breakfasts in the Airstream’s small “kitchen,” then heads to work. But the Berkeley-based landscape architect doesn’t drive to an office; he heads to the actual site in his Honda CR-V, towing behind it a wheeled “think tank”—a 2003 cherry-red Wells Cargo trailer that he found on Craigslist.
Photos: See inside his home and office trailers
Once there, he throws open the trailer’s back door and drafts his plans in full view of the garden he’s redesigning. This isn’t exactly the norm in the modern, virtual reality–driven world of landscape architecture. But Stavropoulos—who earned his MLA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007—is a back-to-the-land kind of guy. He wants to ground his garden plans in the realities of the site, and he retrofitted the 6- by 10-foot cargo trailer to help him do that.
Both the trailer and the Airstream—which he painstakingly remodeled using a friend’s sculpture studio at Stanford University and another friend’s woodworking shop in Oakland—are suited for the life he leads now. “I have always loved small, manageable, mobile spaces,” he says. “They allow me breathing time as I set off on my chosen path.”
Info: Andreas Stavropoulos, XS Land Architects (415/710-0431)
At Home
At Work