The Coleman Family Cabin Tent is a spacious tent that is ideal for family trips into the great outdoors. This tent has two separate rooms, each of which can hold a queen-sized airbed along with camping gear. Adults as tall as 6-foot-3 can move about this tent standing upright. With a 44-square-foot vestibule, and 86 square feet of interior living space, the tent has plenty of room to house beds, cribs, gear, pets, and camping furniture. Zippered doors can enclose the vestibule fully, so it serves as a separate room for the tent, or you can leave one or both open, so the vestibule can act like a porch or mudroom.
This Coleman Cabin Tent with Instant Setup is loaded with features that include two doors, 5 windows, dark rest design, 60 seconds setup, and much more. The fabric is what they call WeatherTec and this is a polyester. There is no information about its waterproof rating, so this is quite disappointing. The floor is most likely a polyethylene, no official info about this.
The Coleman Instant Cabin makes getting camp set up quicker and easier than ever. This instant tent has pre-attached poles that make setting up camp as simple as unfolding, extending, and securing. You can assemble the tent in about a minute and then get started on your adventure.
This tent has an integrated rain fly, and could have been stuffy without a lot of thoughtful attention to ventilation. This pentagon-shaped tent opens and closes like an umbrella, making for a speedy and intuitive setup. The four windows, floor-to-ceiling door, and skylight roof allow lots of ventilation and superior cross breeze on hot days. Seasons-wise and climate-wise, I see this tent as a summer camping tent, or maximum for 2 seasons (late spring, summer, and early autumn). The ceiling is all mesh which cannot be closed, so this is great for warm weather camping but this is not optimal for a cold environment.
I’ve got 2 CORE Equipment Cabin Tents, and also a whopping 14 Coleman tents, so based on my experiences with these tents, here are my thoughts on both brands. It’s always advised to waterproof a new tent before the first use to keep out heavy rains. It was easy to disassemble and pack up, having us out of our campsite in no time.
This is not all, there is yet another great detail here and this is its hinged door shown below. So if you are not familiar with this design, there are poles that run around the door’s perimeter and this is a rigid structure similar to the door at home. There are also Velcro tabs that coleman sleeping bags keep it closed so you do not have to wrestle with the zipper all the time. This is added to drain the rainwater and this is of importance for the tent without the porch. The picture below shows how deep the screen room is under the porch, and it is fully protected from the rain.
Both Base Camp tents have two doors and lots of mesh in the main tent body. But unlike the Mineral King 3 and the Tungsten 4, the mesh on each Base Camp tent starts high on the walls—more than 4 feet from the ground. This design is a big plus for people who regularly camp in crowded campgrounds and don’t like to get naked in front of strangers.
As it costs less than $20 USD, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to add a level of comfort that could otherwise spoil your camping adventure if you went without it. The stitching is generally fine, both brands use a mixture of inverted seams and taped seams, and I sometimes found loose threads, but it’s not a big issue for me. There’s only a little bit of light seeping in through the gap between the roof and the rainfly, and also from the bathtub flooring at the bottom of the tent. I also looked at the quality of the instant tent mechanism for both my Coleman 10-Person Instant Tent, and my Core 9-Person Instant Tent. The best tent I have for rainy day ventilation is actually the WeatherMaster 10-Person Tent, which comes with these 2 angled windows that I could zip up from the inside of the tent if I needed to. On top of that, the PU coatings on both tents are specifically stated to be “water-resistant”, emphasis on “resistant”, and not exactly the most waterproof.
The rain fly is a cinch to connect and, what’s more, the open roof makes this a dreamy tent for gazing up at the stars or at a tree canopy. Our son loved hanging out in it when we tested it in our front yard, which is a testimony to its excellent ventilation. We tested the four-person version of this tent and have to say that, when they say instant, they mean it.