Tents with darkened bedrooms are fast becoming commonplace in festival campsites, where they were rare only a few years ago. The most popular are Coleman’s Blackout tents range and Quechua’s Fresh&Black range, with the established tent manufacturers among the first to bring dark bedroom tents to the mass market.
Competitors have now followed with their own dark bedrooms, and while Coleman’s Blackout and Quechua’s Fresh&Black ranges remain the most effective at blocking natural light, tents such as Vango’s Midnight range get pretty close
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Benefits of dark bedroom and blackout tents
The main benefit of a tent with a darkened bedroom is you won’t be awakened by an early morning sunrise. At festivals like Glastonbury, held just days after the summer solstice, we’re talking really early; sunrise can start as early as 4 am. Standard tents do absolutely nothing to block this light, so with most of us used to sleeping behind solid walls and closed curtains, it’s pretty normal to wake up early at super-early while camping and then struggle to get back to sleep. Not what you want when you’ve been up late and you’ve got a hangover on the way.
Sure, you could wear an eye mask to get around the brightness, but it’s not just the light itself that wakes you up in the morning – it’s the heat. If you’ve ever woken up to a sunny morning in a tent, you know how quickly tents turn into an oven as soon as the morning sun hits them. And with the sun beating down, they never seem to cool down enough to get back to sleep no matter how many doors you open.
So do blackout tents work?
Yes! Darkened bedrooms are the answer to those sweaty mornings in your tent. By blocking external light, they keep out the sun’s heat, with most brands keeping your bedroom up to 5C colder during the day and some a massive 17C less than a standard tent in direct sun. And then at night, this same effect keeps your bedroom slightly warmer too.
Most have windows so you can let the light in when you need to see what you’re doing, and some manufacturers also have a range of partially darkened tents, such as Vango’s Nightfall. They don’t block quite as much light as their Midnight product line but still offer protection which delays the Sun’s light and heat from waking you up.
The best Coleman Blackout tents for festivals
Coleman’s Blackout tents are the defacto standard for darkened bedrooms. The original and to many, still the best, they block more light and heat than most competitors. Coleman tents were already brilliant quality and we’ve recommended one for years in our guide to the best (non-darkened) festival tents. Having always used tents from supermarkets and cheaper brands, my first season with the Coleman I was constantly noticing helpful little touches and attention-to-detail that made each festival (and building and taking down the tent!) that much easier.
Coleman tents often come at a slightly higher price than some of their competitors below, but if you’ve got a group going you can split it with then the price difference becomes way less significant. They have great build quality and materials so jf you look after it, you’ll have made a solid investment that’ll last for as many years as you want it to.
Their instantly recognisable Coleman ‘The Blackout’ 3-person tent is among our recommendations below, but you may want to check out the Coleman ‘Kobuk Valey’ 3/4-person tent as it often offers much better value for a very similar tent (in different colours but still with a blackout bedroom!)
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The best Quechua Fresh&Black tents for festivals
Quechua’s Fresh&Black tents also offer fully darkened bedrooms with guaranteed 99% darkness. Quechua is the camping and hiking brand of Decathlon, the world’s biggest sporting goods retailer, so while you’ll find their full range on their official website you’ll also find some of their tents on the high street.
Fresh&Black is their own unique patented technology and you won’t find it on any other brand’s tents. Not only is it extremely effective at blocking both the light and heat from the sun, it’s packed with features and specially selected features to ventilate your tent and remove excess humidity. In direct sunlight, this can keep your bedroom a whopping 17C cooler than a standard tent.
As for sustainability, Queucha go the extra mile to reduce the environmental impact of their tents. Dyeing tent fabric typically both consumes loads of water and produces loads of wastewater. To combat this, Queucha use lots of ‘greige’ coloured-elements which are the fabric’s natural colour. Then, when colours are required, they have some techniques to drastically cut their environmental impact. These including a ‘mass pigmentation process’, which cuts out dyeing by adding the colour directly when the fabrics are first produced, and using alternately coloured threads with half remaining their natural colour.
Best Fresh&Black tent for 2-3 people
This is Queucha’s take on our favourite shape of tent, with one massive bedroom and a massive porch or living area too! You’ll fit four people in that bedroom when you need to, though we recommend it for 2 or 3 people because of the abundance of space you’ll have in there – even if you’ve brought loads of other festival gear and massive backpacks along with you.
With room for (some people!) to stand up inside, it’s the most spacious of any tent we recommend in this shape. The bedroom is pre-assembled to make set-up and take-down even faster. It’s been through tropical rain storm lab testing and put through its paces in an omnidirectional wind tunnel, so you can be sure it’ll keep you dry in the heaviest storm and that the sides won’t cave in under a strong gust of wind.
Best Fresh&Black tent with two bedrooms
This is Quechua Fresh&Black version of a tried and tested festival tent format; two bedrooms, each on opposite sides of a living area which you can use for storage or a place to hang out on your camping chairs when the rain comes over.
Like the one-bedroom version above, it’s been through tropical rain storm lab testing and put through its paces in an omnidirectional wind tunnel, so it’ll keep out the heaviest rain and won’t collapse or cave in when the wind hits it.
This one’s rated for four people, two in each bedroom – but if you check out the blackout tents page on the Decathlon website you’ll find similar designs for six or eight people.
Best pop-up Fresh&Black tents
Quechua also have a range of high-end pop-up tents with their Fresh&Black technology. Pop-up tents get a bad rep sometimes, but that’s because it’s such a popular design among the tiny, leaky single-layer tents which, unfortunately, often get left behind after a festival.
These double-layer pop-up tents are waterproof – and so easy to pitch and take down that there’s no chance you’ll want to leave them behind in the fields.
They’re available in both 2-person and 3-person sizes, with XL versions available of each – giving you that little bit extra headroom and a slightly larger bedroom.
The best Vango Nightfall tents for festivals
Vango is another well-established, high-quality camping brand and their range of tents includes both ‘midnight’ and ‘nightfall’ bedrooms. Midnight blocks as much light as possible, while Nightfall offers darkened bedrooms which provide protection from early morning light but remain wholly made of breathable fabric and let enough light through in the daytime so you can easily see what you’re doing.
The Vango Alpha 300 boasts one of these Nightfall bedrooms rated for up to three people while being compact enough to use (and carry!) on your own. It packs down pretty small and has a total weight of only around 4 kilos. It’s a simple construction, where you build the inner dome tent first then attach the outer flysheet over the top.