This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through our links, we may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. This helps us keep the blog running and sharing more tips for van life. Thank you for your support!
Because the best meals don’t require a big kitchen — just a clever one.
There’s a particular kind of chaos that happens in a campervan kitchen at 7pm on a Tuesday. You’re parked somewhere beautiful — maybe overlooking a lake, maybe tucked into a forest clearing — and you’re trying to make pasta. The olive oil is behind the sleeping bag. The colander is under the driver’s seat. You’ve opened three wrong drawers and somehow found a phone charger, a deck of cards, and a carabiner, but not the wooden spoon you swear you packed.
Sound familiar?
Living and cooking in a campervan is one of the most joyful, liberating experiences modern life has to offer. But it demands a level of organizational thinking that most of us never needed in our brick-and-mortar kitchens. When your entire cooking space measures roughly the size of a single kitchen countertop, every centimeter counts. Every decision — where the mugs live, how the spices are stored, whether you fold or roll your dish towels — has real consequences for your daily comfort.
The good news: small space kitchen design has come a long way. And the van life community, collectively, has figured out some genuinely brilliant solutions. Here are ten of the smartest campervan kitchen storage ideas that actually work in real life — not just in Pinterest photos.
1. Build Upward, Not Outward: Vertical Storage Is Your Best Friend
The single biggest mistake first-time van builders make is ignoring vertical space. When your floor space is fixed — and it is — the only direction left is up.
Think about your kitchen walls as usable real estate. A row of hooks mounted at eye level can hold mugs, utensils, a small strainer, even a lightweight pan. A magnetic knife strip — the kind you’d find in a professional kitchen — keeps your knives accessible, safe, and completely off the counter. Floating shelves above the cooking area, secured properly with lips or rails so nothing slides off on bumpy roads, can hold spice jars, small bottles, and the kind of things you reach for constantly.
The key with vertical storage is securing everything properly. A shelf that looks charming when you’re parked becomes a minor disaster when you’re doing 70 on the motorway. Use rails, bungees, or tension rods across shelves to keep items in place while you drive. It takes a little extra planning in the build phase, but you’ll thank yourself the first time you take a sharp corner.
2. Invest in a Magnetic Spice Rack (Seriously, Don’t Skip This One)
If there is one campervan kitchen upgrade that van lifers rave about more than any other, it is the magnetic spice rack. The concept is simple: small metal tins with magnetic bases, attached to a metal strip or directly to a metal surface in your kitchen. They take up zero counter space, zero drawer space, and zero shelf space.
But beyond the practicality, there is something genuinely delightful about a neat row of labeled spice tins on the wall of your van kitchen. It feels intentional. It feels like someone who cares about cooking lives here.
You can buy ready-made magnetic spice sets, or make your own by picking up small metal tins and a sheet of galvanized steel from a hardware store. Label them clearly — dried oregano and cumin look identical at 6am — and you’ve solved one of the most annoying small kitchen problems in one elegant move.
A practical tip: decant your spices before you travel. Bulky glass jars from the supermarket take up disproportionate space and break easily. Small uniform tins keep everything consistent, balanced, and compact.
3. Stackable, Nesting Everything — Pots, Bowls, Containers, All of It
Open any experienced van lifer’s cupboard and you will notice one thing immediately: almost nothing is a standalone item. Everything nests. Everything stacks. Everything collapses.
This is the principle of nesting cookware, and once you embrace it, you cannot go back. A good nesting pot and pan set — there are several excellent options from brands like GSI Outdoors and Magma — might include a large pot, a medium pot, a frying pan, and a lid that serves multiple pieces, all stacking inside each other to take up the space of a single pot.
The same principle applies to bowls, plates, and food storage containers. Mismatched kitchen items are the enemy of small space living. Replace them with uniform, stackable sets and you will be amazed how much cupboard space suddenly appears.
Collapsible items deserve a special mention: collapsible silicone colanders, collapsible kettles, collapsible measuring cups. When flattened, they slip into a slim gap between items and practically disappear. When you need them, they expand to full size in seconds. They feel like a small miracle the first time you use one.
4. The Underbed Kitchen Drawer: Using Dead Space Brilliantly
In most campervan layouts, the sleeping platform creates a significant void of unused space underneath. Many builders use this for general storage, but with a little forethought, it can become some of the most useful kitchen storage in the entire van.
A custom-built drawer that slides out from under the sleeping platform — on full-extension drawer runners so you can access everything at the back — is ideal for storing larger, less frequently used kitchen items: a cast iron skillet, a baking dish, extra pots, a camping oven. These are the things you need occasionally but not daily, and they are often the items that are hardest to find homes for.
If building a full drawer feels beyond your current skill level or budget, simple wooden crates or IKEA-style pull-out boxes placed under the bed work almost as well. The point is to stop treating that space as dead weight and start treating it as your kitchen’s overflow storage.
5. A Pegboard Panel Changes Everything
Pegboards are the unsung heroes of small kitchen organization, and they translate beautifully into campervan kitchens. A single sheet of pegboard — cut to fit a wall panel in your kitchen area and mounted securely — gives you infinitely reconfigurable storage for virtually no cost.
Hooks of different sizes hold mugs, utensils, oven gloves, a small cutting board, a lightweight pan. Narrow shelves slotted into the pegboard can hold spice jars or small bottles. Everything is visible, accessible, and off your limited counter space.
The beauty of pegboard is that it grows with you. When your needs change — and they will, because van life is a constant process of refinement — you just move the hooks. No drilling new holes. No commitment. Just slide, reposition, and carry on.
Paint it the same color as your interior walls and it looks intentional and finished. Leave it natural wood-toned and it feels rustic and warm. Either way, it works.
6. Drawer Dividers and Tension Rods: The Unsexy Solution That Actually Matters
Here is an unglamorous truth about campervan kitchen storage: most of the real improvement comes not from clever furniture builds but from what happens inside your existing drawers and cupboards.
Without internal organization, drawers become jumble zones. Things slide around on every turn. You spend thirty seconds every morning fishing your spatula out from under a tangle of cables. It is not dramatic, but it is genuinely exhausting over time.
Drawer dividers — adjustable, no-tools-needed, available in any home goods shop — transform a chaotic drawer into a calm, logical one. Assign a zone to every category: cooking utensils, eating utensils, miscellaneous tools. Everything has a home. Everything goes back to its home.
Tension rods — the slim spring-loaded rods you’d normally use for a shower curtain — have a brilliant secondary use inside kitchen cupboards. Placed vertically, they divide a wide shelf into sections that keep cutting boards, pan lids, and baking sheets standing upright instead of falling over. Placed horizontally, they create a barrier that stops jars and bottles from sliding forward when you brake suddenly.
Neither of these things will make your van look any different from the outside. But they will make daily life inside it significantly calmer.
7. Hang a Fruit and Vegetable Net
Fresh produce is one of the most awkward things to store in a campervan kitchen. It doesn’t stack neatly. It bruises if packed too tightly. It needs airflow to stay fresh. And it takes up valuable counter or cupboard space that you really cannot afford to give it.
The solution that generations of boat-dwellers figured out long before van life became a movement: the hanging produce net.
A simple mesh net — the kind used on sailboats, available cheaply online — hung from the ceiling or a high wall mount stores onions, garlic, avocados, citrus fruit, and hardy vegetables perfectly. They get the airflow they need. They’re visible, so you actually use them before they go bad. And they take up exactly zero counter space.
As a bonus, a net full of colorful fruit and vegetables is one of the most cheerful things you can have in a small kitchen. It makes the space feel abundant rather than cramped. A cluster of oranges, a few lemons, a head of garlic — it’s functional, but it also just looks like someone who loves food lives here.
8. Decant Everything Into Uniform Jars
Walk into any beautifully organized van kitchen and you will almost certainly see a collection of uniform glass or plastic jars — pasta, rice, lentils, oats, flour, sugar, coffee, all decanted from their original bulky packaging into matching containers with clear labels.
This is not just an aesthetic choice (although it does look lovely). It is a deeply practical one.
Original supermarket packaging — cardboard boxes, floppy plastic bags, half-used paper sacks — is inefficient, irregular in shape, and prone to spilling. Uniform jars stack cleanly, seal properly, use shelf space efficiently, and make it immediately obvious what you have and how much of it is left.
Wide-mouth mason jars are a popular choice because they’re inexpensive, durable, and easy to clean. Plastic Oxo containers are excellent if you prefer something lighter and unbreakable. Whichever you choose, buy one size that you use for everything — or at most two sizes, one for larger quantities and one for smaller ones.
Label everything, including the date you decanted it. Future you, reaching for the container at the back of the shelf on a dark morning, will be grateful.
9. The Over-the-Sink Cutting Board: Double Your Counter Space Instantly
In a campervan kitchen, your sink takes up counter space that you cannot afford to lose. The over-the-sink cutting board solves this with satisfying elegance: a custom-cut board that sits across your sink basin, transforming dead sink space into usable prep surface when you’re not using the water.
Most van builders make these from a single piece of wood — treated to be food-safe and water-resistant — cut to the exact dimensions of their sink. Some include a small hole or slot so you can sweep chopped ingredients directly into a bowl below. Some build in a colander recess. Some are as simple as a flat board that sits over the basin and lifts off in seconds.
The beauty of this solution is that it costs almost nothing to make, requires no permanent modification to your kitchen, and effectively gives you an extra foot of prep space whenever you need it. In a kitchen where counter space is measured in inches, an extra foot is transformative.
If you’re not confident making your own, check Etsy — there are builders who make custom sizes, and the investment is usually modest.
10. Create a “Daily Kit” That Lives Outside the Storage System
This last one is less about furniture and more about how you think about your kitchen — and it might be the most important tip on this list.
In a full-sized kitchen, you can tolerate a little inefficiency. In a campervan kitchen, everything you have to do twice — open a cupboard, move one thing to reach another, repack what you just unpacked — adds friction to your day. Enough friction and the joy of cooking on the road starts to feel like a chore.
The solution is to identify the things you use every single day — your coffee setup, your one go-to pan, your favourite mug, a knife and a chopping board — and give them a dedicated spot that requires zero unpacking to access. Not inside a cupboard. Not behind something else. Right there, immediately reachable, always in the same place.
For many van lifers, this looks like a small tray or basket on the counter that holds the daily essentials. For others, it’s a section of hooks or a small open shelf designated entirely for daily-use items. The specific solution matters less than the principle: create a fast lane for the things you reach for every day, so that the complexity of your full storage system is invisible during normal daily life.
Your van should feel like a kitchen that works for you, not a puzzle you have to solve before every meal.
Small Kitchen, Big Life
The best campervan kitchens are not the biggest ones or the most expensively fitted ones. They are the ones that were thought through carefully by someone who actually cooks in them — where every decision reflects real daily life rather than an idealized version of it.
You will not get it perfect on the first build, and that is completely fine. Van life is iterative. You will discover that you never use the item you devoted an entire drawer to, and that the thing you use every morning has nowhere logical to live. You will reorganize. You will rebuild small sections. You will move hooks and add a shelf and remove a shelf and try something else.
That process of refinement is part of the joy. Every tweak makes the space work a little better, feel a little more like yours.
And one day — maybe parked by that lake, maybe in that forest clearing — you will reach for the wooden spoon and it will be exactly where you left it. The pasta will go on. The olive oil will be within arm’s reach. And you will eat the best meal of your week in a kitchen the size of a countertop, watching the light fade over somewhere beautiful.
That is the point of all of it.
Have a campervan kitchen storage solution that changed your life on the road? Share it in the comments — the best ideas in van life always come from the community.
Recommended Products :
1. 🧲 Magnetic Spice Tins + Wall Mount
The van lifer’s #1 upgrade — 12 labeled tins that stick to any metal surface and free up every drawer and shelf.
👉 HEFANTU 12 Magnetic Spice Tins with Wall Mount – Amazon
2. 🍳 Nesting Cookware Set (GSI Outdoors)
Pots, pans, lids, and bowls that all nest into one another — the size of a single pot. A van kitchen game-changer.
👉 GSI Outdoors Bugaboo Camper Nesting Cook Set – Amazon
3. 🔪 Magnetic Knife Strip (Wall Mount)
Keeps your knives safe, accessible, and completely off the counter. Also holds utensils and tools.
👉 Modern Innovations 16″ Stainless Steel Magnetic Knife Bar – Amazon
4. 🥗 Collapsible Silicone Colander (Set of 3)
Folds flat to barely an inch thick when not in use. Expands to a full colander in seconds. Perfect for tiny kitchens, RVs, and campervans.
👉 HAPIBI Collapsible Colander Set of 3 – Amazon
5. 📦 OXO Good Grips POP Containers (10-Piece Set)
Airtight, stackable, one-button-seal containers for pasta, rice, oats, flour — everything you’d otherwise be storing in floppy bags.
👉 OXO Good Grips 10-Piece POP Container Set – Amazon
6. 🫙 Ball Wide-Mouth Mason Jars (12-Pack)
The classic decanting solution. Uniform, airtight, durable, and they stack perfectly. Great for dry goods and pantry staples.
👉 Ball Wide Mouth Pint 16oz Mason Jars, 12-Pack – Amazon
7. 🗂️ Adjustable Bamboo Drawer Dividers (4-Pack)
No tools needed — spring-loaded tension holds them in place. Turn any jumbled drawer into a calm, organised one.
👉 Homemaid Living Bamboo Drawer Dividers, 4-Pack – Amazon
8. 🪢 Tension Rod Cabinet Organiser (Expandable)
Place vertically to separate pan lids and cutting boards. Place horizontally to stop jars sliding when you brake. One of the cheapest, most effective van kitchen hacks there is.
👉 Hershii Closet Tension Shelf & Rod Expandable Organiser – Amazon
9. 🍋 Hanging Produce Mesh Bags (5-Pack)
Inspired by generations of boat kitchens — hang onions, garlic, citrus, and hardy veg for airflow and visibility. Frees up every inch of counter and cupboard space.
👉 Ahyuan Hanging Mesh Storage Bags, 5-Pack – Amazon
10. 🍳 Collapsible RV Colander with Stainless Steel & Funnel
A bonus pick — stainless base, collapses completely flat, and doubles as a funnel. Specifically designed for RVs and campers.
👉 Collapsible Colander & Funnel – RV/Camper Kitchen – Amazon
