Full review

Words & photos: Peter Vaughan

The Knights Custom Mountain Peak

Knights Custom Conversions’ Mountain Peak is not a new model but the company has redeveloped the design for this season. It retains the rear kitchen and loo layout but the big news is the on-board shower, which is a very rare find in a pop-top camper.

Of course, the roof (a front-hinged unit from Reimo) has to be raised first and there’s a privacy screen that pulls down from the lowered roof bed, then you uncover the Corian shower tray that’s hidden under a panel in the kitchen area floor.

Knights makes the tray in-house and will supply a shower curtain that clips into it with metal rods that seal it in place, preventing any water from escaping. The shower curtain also widens towards the top (where it measures 650mm by 750mm), so that you have sufficient space.

Water and ablutions

The boiler is a Webasto Thermo Top Evo RV diesel system, which, it is claimed, can supply hot water in three minutes (as well as providing the blown-air heating). The biggest limiting factor could be the size of the water tanks (27-litre fresh and 30-litre waste), as this 4Motion vehicle has less space underneath; a standard model on a front-wheel drive T6.1 would have tanks of 70 and 58 litres, respectively.

The shower is actually an option but all Mountain Peaks have the bench cassette toilet, fitted in the rear offside corner. Unlike some VW campers of this ilk, it hasn’t been hidden away behind cupboard doors or disguised with a cushion.

The kitchen

Sharing the rear of the camper with the ablutions, as with rival VW conversions, is the kitchen. Here, you’ll find tall units on the offside, with the main galley opposite. A really unusual duck egg blue finish for the furniture had been specified by this camper’s buyer, but the upmarket Corian worktops are something of a Knights trademark.

In this example, the customer wanted to go gas-free, so, along with the diesel-fired heating and hot water, there’s all-electric cooking via a Thetford two-ring induction hob and a built-in Dometic microwave (in a floor-level cupboard).

The fridge is electric only, too – a 42-litre Vitrifrigo compressor model (hidden behind a cupboard door and placed above the microwave) and, to provide the necessary power without relying constantly on mains hook-ups, this camper has a 100Ah lithium battery, a 2,500W pure sine wave inverter, 50a AC charger and a 50a DC charger. The system includes a jump start feature for the campervan and automatically swaps to the mains supply if you plug in. Getting rid of the gas puts a £2,750 premium on the conversion.

The layout

Up front, Knights retains the individual rear travel seats that you’d expect with this type of layout. Here, the customer had specified a double passenger seat in the cab, but the Mountain Peak will normally be a four-seater with individual front seats. That will make for easier seat swivelling but it’s a credit to Knights’ ingenuity that here it has enabled both the driver’s seat and the cab bench to rotate. Thus, you have five positions around the central island leg table.

The rear RIB Neptune seats flatten to create a 1.78m-long single bed on the offside and a longer (1.90m) bed on the nearside (where the rear back seat is set slightly further back). The sideways sliding mechanism on these seats also enables them to move together to make a double bed.

The specification

As Knights’ campers sit at the premium end of the market, it’s no surprise to see Nappa leather (£3,545 extra) throughout the lounge, nor discover that the base vehicle here is a brand-new T6.1 Highline with 204PS (201bhp) engine, 4Motion all-wheel drive and DSG twin-clutch gearbox.

The Mountain Peak is only available on the long-wheelbase Transporter and this Deep Pearl Black example looked very restrained; Knights offers a full range of Abt styling and a selection of alloy wheels for those seeking something more extrovert.

As shown, the camper would top £90k on-the-road but lesser spec versions (of the VW and the conversion) would bring the cost down.