He Bought a 1953 Trailer on Impulse. But What to Do With It?

Lyndon Cormack loves his waterfront house in North Vancouver, Canada, which sits at the bottom of an old forestry road beneath towering cedar and Douglas fir trees.

“It feels like you’re in the middle of nowhere,” he said of the home he shares with his girlfriend, Tori Quarles, 34, and two teenage daughters, “even though it’s only 25 minutes from downtown Vancouver.”

But after living there for a decade, a couple of things bothered him.

“It lacked a cool spot for guests,” said Mr. Cormack, 47, a founder of the backpack and luggage manufacturer Herschel Supply Company. “And I always wanted a home office that would allow me to escape my actual house.”

Over the years, he had discussed ideas for additions with Mark Burkart, an architect who owns a firm called Little Giant and had worked on a cabin that Mr. Cormack owns in nearby Whistler, but nothing really gelled.

Then, while on vacation in the summer of 2022, he found himself browsing Bring a Trailer, an online auction site for classic cars, and saw a listing for something irresistible: an aluminum-clad, 31-foot Spartan Spartanette travel trailer from 1953. Before even considering what he would do with it, Mr. Cormack placed a bid for $70,000 — the winning bid, it turned out — and bought the trailer from a seller in South Carolina.