Side door vs. rear door

[moroza]

I'm still in the planning stages of a DIY camper build on an '81 Toyota 4x4 frame. Right now I'm trying to decide between a side-door or rear-door layout, and hoping some folks can weigh in with their experience and thoughts on the relative merits of the two designs.

The competing layouts I'm considering are 6.2 and 9:

Bright red lines represent full-height floor-to-ceiling partitions (closets). Dark red are partial-height (bins). Dark purple is a sideways Murphy bed in half-out (couch) mode, light purple is in full-out (bed) mode. The gray X-ed box represents the floorspace taken up by the woodstove and everything it comes with. The cross-section view is looking forward. There, the blue is the shape of half the bed's mattress, the green is a fold-down table/counter, and the curved dark red is the shape of the cab cutout. The white boxes are the wheel wells.

Constraints and externalities:

* The space is 4' tall by 5' wide by 8' long. I will not make it longer, wider, or taller, for various reasons.

* The back of the cab will be cut out and joined with the rear box. "Flow" between the cab and box is very important to me. I'll eventually have a captain's chair mount for the passenger seat.

* The bed/couch design is pretty much fixed. It must be full-width and be able to fold away.

What the pros-n-cons basically boil down to is this: a side door feels nicer to live with and has more cargo room. But much of its cargo room is at the back of the vehicle (real heavy stuff like water and batteries can still be in the center, though). Maybe I'm still stuck too much in performance-car-thinking, but that seems like bad design from a moving-vehicle perspective. Anyway... your $.02?