Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Growing up in Germany in the \u201970s and \u201980s, the daughter of\u00a0a\u00a0British army regimental sergeant major, Rhonda Drakeford wanted \u201cto\u00a0design planes or vehicles, because that\u2019s what I\u00a0was surrounded by\u201d, says the designer. \u201cI\u00a0thought I was going to be in the army, I\u00a0didn\u2019t see a job outside.\u201d\u00a0Her father had different ideas \u2013 \u201cmy dad was, like, there\u2019s no way you could be in the army\u201d \u2013 and so, on the recommendation of a teacher, she applied to Central Saint Martins in London to study graphic design. \u201cI didn\u2019t even really know what it was. I was very naive but I\u2019d always had this problem-solving mind, an interest in the engineering side of things, and that translated really well to design.\u201dIn 2009 she launched the interior design and accessories brand and store Darkroom, in Bloomsbury, with Lulu Roper-Caldbeck. Seven years later this morphed into Studio Rhonda, whose modernist, Bauhaus-influenced interiors (with a penchant for bold, blocky primary colours) have been featured in The World of Interiors, Elle Decoration and The New York Times. In 2022 she redesigned the offices of the London communications firm\u00a0Zetteler to great acclaim, and now she is working on a temporary space for\u00a0a charity in Smithfield (\u201ceverything has\u00a0to be second-hand\u201d), a house in Clapton, a record-label office and her first international commission, in Puglia.\u00a0The rear-mounted engine has the added advantage of heating the mattressBut the project currently closest to her heart takes her back to that childhood in Germany where she planned on designing vehicles and spent her holidays camping with her parents. Last summer she bought Velma, a 1988 VW Transporter campervan, and set about reconfiguring it inside and out. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about buying one for probably 10 years,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it became more serious when I got a dog [Lupo, a Patterdale-Jack Russell cross], because he\u2019s quite tricky. He doesn\u2019t really suit London and he\u2019s very reactive because there\u2019s so much stimulation. I was finding that I was getting out of London a lot more, escaping at weekends when I could, renting shepherd\u2019s huts and heading into the middle of nowhere.\u201dDog apart, it\u2019s also a professional choice to enable her to take work on the road. \u201cIt means I can be off-grid for a week easily and still be working on my laptop. I find when I get out of London that\u2019s when I get my ideas.\u201dThe VW campervan is, of course, a classic of its kind. It\u2019s been around since the launch of the T1 Transporter in 1950, but less known is the fact that its invention had nothing to do with camping at all. It was born of a sketch by a Dutch businessman, Ben Pon, made after he visited the Volkswagen factory; seeing a van-like vehicle transporting parts made him wonder how the VW Beetle could be adapted for commercial use.\u00a0\u201cVW didn\u2019t do campervans; there were these coach-building companies like Westfalia, Holdsworth and Auto-Sleepers that converted them,\u201d says Drakeford. Her T25\/T3 was originally converted by Auto-Sleepers and was the last VW camper model to have a\u00a0rear-mounted engine like the Beetle. The third incarnation of the VW camper, it is much more angular than the bubble-shaped earlier design that became synonymous with hippy culture in the 1960s. \u201cAll modern vehicles are getting more and more\u00a0sort of blobby, and I like that simple [silhouette] as if it\u2019s drawn like a child, in a\u00a0way. T3s are affectionately known as \u2018bricks\u2019 in the community,\u201d she says.When I get out of London, that\u2019s when I get my ideasPainted white, the van was in pretty good shape when Drakeford bought it, but with the help of VW specialist customiser Slaughter House Customs in Haywards Heath she has redesigned it to suit her \u2013 and her dog\u2019s \u2013 specific needs. \u201cI\u2019m creating this for me, so I can make radical decisions in a way that other people might think, \u2018That\u2019s crazy.\u2019\u201d The van already had a\u00a0high-top fixed roof rather than a pop-top (\u201cless faff\u201d) so she can stand up straight when inside; Slaughter House restored the bodywork, added a solar panel and installed Drakeford\u2019s own interior. She contemplated having the power-train converted to electric, but that would have cost around \u00a350,000, and the advantage of the rear-mounted engine is that \u201cit heats up the mattress [stowed above it] as well\u201d.\u00a0Before designing the storage and kitchen, she bought all the plates, pots, pans and other camping accessories that she\u2019d need and configured the interior around them. The\u00a0cooking unit that slides out through the side door to create an outdoor kitchen is the result of a commission by the furniture store Aram, who asked 10\u00a0designers to use the Meccano-like modular furniture of Swiss brand USM to create something that would improve their work lives. As Drakeford notes, one of the downsides of an internal cooker is that \u201cif you have a fry-up, you can smell it for two weeks\u201d. The cabinets, meanwhile, are finished with a thin skin of \u201cmicro-cement\u201d coloured with different pigments, which \u201cgives you a\u00a0lovely cloudy finish\u201d. There\u2019s a\u00a0small fridge but no sink (\u201cyou can\u2019t wash\u00a0up anything in something that small, so I have a big bowl and do it outside\u201d), while the Portaloo and shower are housed\u00a0in a \u201cTardis-like\u201d tent.\u00a0The exterior is a nod to her military upbringing. \u201cI really leaned into the toughness of the exterior, its angularity,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m a complete pacifist but I\u2019m really fascinated by military vehicles. You know when you\u2019re on a motorway, and the convoy will go past, and there are these bonkers-looking machines on wheels, essentially. They\u2019re just purely practical and they\u2019ve got this matte paint finish.\u201d The van is finished in military-grade Raptor paint; in a further nod\u00a0to her obsession with shipping containers, its colour is rust red (\u201cI literally went around service stations checking the colour of containers against my RAL cards\u201d). She then\u00a0added Bauhaus pops of primary colour, with a blue roof rack, signal-red wing mirrors and a yellow ladder on the back.\u00a0Drakeford is planning her first big trip with Velma to the Alps this summer \u2013 and who knows where it will then take her professionally. \u201cIt\u2019s like, have van, will travel,\u201d she says. \u201cMaybe it will open up a whole world of international clients. Go park up in some drive somewhere and spend the summer doing someone\u2019s house.\u201d\u00a0Conversion by slaughterhousecustoms.com. To hire the van, contact studio-rhonda.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Growing up in Germany in the \u201970s and \u201980s, the daughter of\u00a0a\u00a0British army regimental sergeant major, Rhonda Drakeford wanted \u201cto\u00a0design planes or vehicles, because that\u2019s what<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":284121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-284120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284122,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284120\/revisions\/284122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}