Hollywood imagery of America filled Bill Moggridge with yearning when he was growing up in England after World War II. “Being a European and brought up after the war, everything was a little bit hard,” said Mr. Moggridge, an influential industrial designer who is the director of the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York. “Ordinary things were hard to come by. We didn’t have a TV. My parents couldn’t afford a car.

Looking at America, at Hollywood, at the houses and cars, it all seemed so full of fantasy. Impossible fantasy. I don’t know that I necessarily thought it was good. I thought it was fantastic.”

So in the 1970s, Mr. Moggridge moved to California - not to Hollywood, but to Silicon Valley, where he designed, among other things, what is considered the first laptop computer, becoming a founder of the design firm IDEO. In off-hours, he gravitat ed to his teenage reveries of 1950s America, clad in what to him was the decade’s most magical substance: aluminum.

It’s amazing that aluminum was once considered so rare that, in possibly the grandest gesture of 1884, the crowning pyramid at the top of the Washington Monument was made of it. (It’s actually the third most common element in the earth’s crust.)

Some 70 years later, aluminum was being fashioned into almost everything, from dishes and buildings to boats and cars .

And, most heavenly to Mr. Moggridge, trailers.

With Americans in thrall to their shiny new cars, and aircraft factories needing ways to keep business going, the aluminum trailer became one of the most emblematic trophies of the decade.

It was democratic, pragmatic and mobile, as well as misguided, preposterous and hopelessly optimistic: America, sealed in a can.

In the 1990s, when Mr. Moggridge and his wife, Karin, were building a house in the hills north of Palo Alto, California, he decided it was time to indulge.

He started with an inexpensive Vagabond, then a Hughes Spartanette .

But both trailers needed renovation, and Mr. Moggridge didn’t have the money, the skill or the interest to get it done.

Then, one weekend about 10 years ago, he drove down the California coast to a gathering of vintage-trailer enthusiasts. There he came across a restored Southland Runabout, complete with lovingly done-up wood cabinets. He bought it , and made it into a guest room.

It may be rather a surprise to find one of today’s most eminent designers with a love for such a kitschy contraption.

“When you go to designers’ houses, you see a lot of kitsch,” he said. “Instead of living the work they do, they like to see the exaggerated edges of how things can go. And kitsch has a kind of shameless enthusiasm that allows you to revel in these values,” like excessive decoration or the overly bold use of color, that are not quite respectable.

“You can’t say it’s elegant or beautiful,” he added, “but you can say it’s a lot of fun.” And it’s not the worst way of describing America, either.

DAVID COLMAN ESSAY