Coleman Castle Pines 4L Blackout

This tent comes packed full of features, with an excellent layout for family camping.  We think it’s ideal if you have one or two children and want a tent for both weekend camping and family camping holidays.

The Coleman Castle Pines 4L Blackout pitched and set-up (Photo Credit: Coleman)

Take a Look

Tent Layout

This tent comes with not only a large living space but also a convenient built-in porch.

As you can see from the tent layout diagram, there’s a lot of useful living space in this tent (Image Credit: Coleman)

Tent Bedrooms

The bedrooms are at the back of the tent. The divider between the bedroom can be unzipped, making it easy to get to young kids if they wake in the night.

Coleman BlackOut bedrooms are in this tent. These bedrooms are darkened to help everyone sleep longer when the sun rises early at the campsite. Coleman also states that their BlackOut technology makes the bedrooms warmer in the evening and cooler in the daytime.

Coleman says that the BlackOut bedroom technology can keep the bedroom up to 5°C cooler during the day and up to 1°C warmer during the night. (Image Credit: Coleman)

The bedrooms have useful storage pockets, and one of the bedrooms has a cable entry point, which is useful for charging your phone at night or running a powered lantern.

This photo gives you a good look inside the tent. You can see the darkened bedrooms clearly in this photo. (Photo Credit: Coleman)

The bedroom doors also come with bug-free mesh, so you can open them up to vent in the day without flies and mosquitos getting in there.

The Inner Living Space

This is a generous size, spanning two whole sections of the tent.

That’s plenty of space for placing camping storage furniture, which is what we recommend for longer family camping holidays to avoid your tent descending into chaos 😉

There are large windows with ventilation in this part of the tent. All the windows have zip-up blinds, which are less hassle than toggle-up binds. Zip-up blinds also allow you to set the blind halfway up, providing you with extra privacy when needed.

This part of the tent can take cable entry from both sides, which gives you more flexibility when pitching.

There is a side door here too. This comes with bug-free mesh, so you can leave it open to cool the tent down on warm days.

The main door is nice and wide, and the groundsheet folds down flat here so that no one trips when walking in and out of the tent.

This door also has bug-free mesh to help keep the annoying flies out of your tent.

An accessory worth getting is the carpet for this part of the tent. This will help make your tent feel warmer at night, providing that extra ground insulation.

The Built-In Porch

The porch is something we rate highly on family tents as it is so practical.  It’s a great place to leave wet coats and muddy boots, somewhere to sit out of the breeze, somewhere to bring chairs and toys in at night, and provides an easy way to get in and out of your tent if it does rain.

As you can see, the porch area provides a great bit of space and a place to sit out of the wind. Note that the groundsheet at the entrance can lay flat. (Photo Credit: Coleman)

If you want to close up the porch, you can purchase the Coleman Vestibule accessory that adds a door and groundsheet to this area.

Front porch door accessory (Photo Credit: Coleman)

Pitching the Tent

This tent is pitched using tent poles that slot together.

Each pole is colour coded. You insert the poles into the colour coded sleeves on the tent.

Here’s a video from Coleman showing you how to pitch the tent.

We also like that the pack size for this tent isn’t large and isn’t heavy. This will make it much easier for you to take to the campsite and store it at home.

Our Hands-On Test

We were fortunate enough to get our hands on a Coleman Castle Pines 4L, and yes, it lived up to expectations.

You can read about our first camp with the tent here.

We can recommend this tent. It gets the Thumbs Up.