What style of family tent is best?

[ThreeFeetTall]

Hope you can offer some advice...should we buy a tent with one big room?

When our first child was born we bought a tent with two separate rooms not next to each other. Will try to post a pic of a similar tent below. I had an idea that after the baby stage was over the kids would enjoy having their own room and my husband and I could have our own room (easier to go to bed later without waking the kids).

However seems like I didn't know anything about real children- I now have a nearly 2 year old that doesn't sleep through and a 5 year old that comes into our bed every night

At the moment we have one adult and one child in each 'pod' of the tent which feels a bit anti social!

Should we change to a tent with one big room like in the picture? Seems like that's what most families have, and seems to make sense if the kids basically want to be next to us anyway. But maybe a waste of money since we already have an otherwise good tent??

What sort of tent works best for 2 adults and 2 young children?

We went with a big single pop up kitchen tent to hold chairs and table for daytime sitting around and eating, and a single pop up one for each person for sleeping. All from Decathlon. Literally couple of minutes to put up and take down.

@Newnamefor2021 we have been in the same position after a storm in our Quechua we had a good nights sleep despite the wind and woke to lots of other damaged tents with ours just needing the guys tightening a bit .
Op the inflator is a hand one with a pressure gauge if you look on decathlon to give you idea of size. We’ve got three air beams on our current tent and each one takes a couple of minutes at most and minimal effort to inflate .

Thanks everyone.

Now added a tent carpet to the shopping list!

I'll do some more thinking about air tents or not. They sound good but I think that might be step too far for DH. He is quite old school and thinks our current tent (like my first pic) is large.

Seems like flexibility is best- being able to choose to have the separate rooms or not.

The Vango tent will have a divider curtain across the sleeping pods, to use or not.

I think tunnel tents (the Vango tent style) make good family tents with a lot of width and light in the living area, and the choice of door - front or side, is good, too.

Tents with a bedroom pod at either end facing each other are called Vis a vis.

We had an Outwell Bear Lake 6 when our dc were young. It is a tunnel design with a huge living area with the bedrooms at the same end with an optional divider making the bedrooms four and two.

We all used to sleep in the four berth side and kept the two berth as a dressing room. Then as dc grew we lifted the divider and spread out more, then ds used to sleep in the 2 berth side by himself.

I love that tent and we still have it as I can’t bear to part with it although do realise that I should sell it so somebody else can have the joy of it. We now have a bell tent and ds, who is 17, uses his own tent. I really like the bell tent but it nowhere near as good as the Bear Lake!

Our vango has an optional divider which is handy.

We have one similar to this

As a family of 5, I love this tent, we all sleep in the sleeping compartment without putting up the dividers and then have loads of living space in the main bit of the tent. Plus we have the porch for even extra space.
We used to have a vango like one of your pictures but you couldn't quite stand up in it and the sloping sleeping compartments used to annoy me.

We will have to upgrade soon as we will be a family of 6 and the tent we have will become a bit squashed as the children get bigger.
I will definitely go for similar style again.