A family workshop, turning a passion for vans into a living.

5 is a husband-and-wife workshop based in Holton Heath, Dorset. What started as evenings and weekends spent converting our own van — a hobby we couldn't stop talking about — slowly became the thing we wanted to do every day. So we made it our living.

The build is a meeting of two trades. I'm an electrician by trade, so the power, the Victron systems, the lighting and every hidden run of cable are done properly — not bodged, not guessed. And I'm a joiner, which is where the fine details come from: the Baltic birch fit-out, the walnut trim, the panels that sit flush to the millimetre. Every cabinet, every hinge line, every touchpoint is made by hand and signed off by us.

We treat each van as a high-performance architectural vessel rather than a vehicle, cutting every panel on an Apollo Spartan CNC router and hand-finishing the joinery. We accept only four commissions a year — precision cannot be hurried, and scarcity is the point. Each build begins as a conversation about how the owner intends to travel, sleep, cook and live in the space, and ends as a vessel engineered to the millimetre.

We're a small family doing something we genuinely love, for a handful of people a year who want something that can't be bought off a forecourt. No two builds leave the workshop alike, and every one is signed off by the hands that made it.