Bailey Orion 460-5

Ideal for a family of five seeking two distinct living areas

Exterior

With rounded front and rear lines, Orions have a unique look. The position of the gas compartment is also different from most. Not on the front, it’s amidships, on the offside, almost directly above the axle. That would seem perfect for weighty gas cylinders – but beware of too light a noseweight (more details on that later).

Orions benefit from singlepiece front windows — a design that both saves weight and lets in more light than triple windows. The 460-5 doesn’t have any exterior lockers. The only hatch is on the nearside and leads directly into the space under the settee, so it’s no use for wet or muddy items like your electric cable and water hoses.

Interior

Orions are among a new breed that are heated by the Whale blown-air system, mounted under floor so it doesn’t have to be accommodated in the layout. That means more flexibility for designers to create innovative layouts – the 460-5’s is unique.

In addition to the expected parallel-settee lounge, there’s a central living space giving you a two-seater dining area plus a long settee opposite. This is the family area – the essence of this model. Three beds make up here – one from the two-person dining area, and bunks created in the settee space. You pull up a bunk base from alongside the wall.

Mattresses for both lower and upper bunks lie on the settee during the day. Each is half the depth of the upholstery in the lounge and the nearside dining area, so the occupants of these two bunks will be the lighterweight kids; the elder (heavier) one will benefit from a full-depth mattress on the nearside bed.

This children’s area is much more spacious than you’d expect in a caravan where body length measures only 5.34m. It’s divided from the kitchen and lounge by two walls and a curtain. Both the kitchen and the dresser opposite have walls that each take up more than a third of the caravan’s width. This creates a clear separation between the living areas.

At night, a curtain spans the corridor between the walls. Dining flexibility is guaranteed in this unique layout. Two can eat at the central dining table and four more at the freestanding table in the lounge. For snacks and coffee you can clip on the small semi-circular, monopod table at the front.

Five seating sections come five storage lockers is brilliant, until you consider that a part of one of those lockers will most likely be claimed by the cook. That’s because the 460-5 has no lower kitchen cabinet; there’s only the fridge to accommodate food. There’s a small cupboard under the oven, but that will probably be entirely occupied by pans. So buyers of this model will need to purchase a couple of plastic storage boxes and place them under seating, to contain anything that doesn’t go in the fridge.

Upper storage in the kitchen is sufficient for placesettings and mugs but not much more than that. Cooking equipment is a combined oven and grill, microwave and three burners in a triangular hob. That shape creates space between the hob and the sink – but making meals for five here will take a lot of organisation and you’ll probably need to use one of the tables for serving onto plates. But then you are looking at a caravan that’s only 1345kg when fully laden, so some compromises have to be accepted. You also have to keep in mind that the 460-5 has a generous amount of dining/ lounging/playing/relaxing space, which is its star feature.

Another brilliant aspect of the 460-5 is its spacious shower room. It spans the whole width of the caravan behind the family area, and contains a large wardrobe, on the offside, with full hanging depth and two deep shelves running its full width. The shower is on the nearside, with a square, deep washbasin alongside it. Unusually, the toilet is mounted on the back panel, between the wardrobe and the washbasin.

There’s enough floorspace for a parent to help with the showering and dressing of little ones, and the square shower is just about large enough for two small children to have a shower together to save water and time. The Orion 460-5 achieves good family accommodation at a good price and with a brilliant light weight. But in one area you could find it’s a shade too light. Rather than putting the weight of gas bottles at the front, Orions have their gas compartments amidships.

In the case of the 460-5, it’s on the nearside, intruding into the living area to create the dresser. But that means there’s no gas to weigh down the nose. The 460-5’s designers, though, have produced a well-balanced model with an unladen noseweight of about 44kg. On the road it behaved predictably stably, its short length making manoeuvring onto pitches easy. Just take care, as we did, to balance the load, by distributing items over the length of the caravan, making sure that weight you put in the rear is matched by items in the front lower lockers, and you’ll be fine.

For £14,595 you get a workable family caravan for five, well-equipped including a hitch head stabiliser and a spare wheel.