2026 Grand DesignImagine XLS 17MKE

The Imagine XLS 17MKE is the most compact floorplan profiled here and one of the cleverest in the line. Its defining feature is a queen Murphy bed: it folds up against the wall during the day to turn the front of the trailer into open living space, then drops down at night. Paired with a rear kitchen and a single slide, it gives a 22-foot couples' trailer a sense of room that its footprint shouldn't allow.

It rides on Grand Design's laminated aluminum-framed construction — gel-coated fiberglass walls over an aluminum cage with rigid foam insulation (R-7), a one-piece roof membrane with a limited lifetime warranty, and a heated, enclosed underbelly with suspended tanks. The XLS line's signature is what comes standard: a 200-watt rooftop solar panel with a 30-amp charge controller and a 10-cubic-foot 12-volt refrigerator, so the trailer is genuinely ready to camp off hookups out of the box.

At 4,921 pounds dry with a 6,395-pound GVWR it leaves 1,474 pounds of payload, and it tows comfortably behind a wide range of medium-duty SUVs and half-ton trucks. For couples who want Grand Design's residential finish and standard solar in the smallest, most towable XLS package — and who value the flexibility of a Murphy bed — the 17MKE is the natural entry point to the line.

Grand Design's Imagine family — the premium-mainstream volume leader and the industry's perennial owner-satisfaction front-runner. It spans three sub-lines: the lightweight Imagine AIM, the medium-duty Imagine XLS (standard rooftop solar), and the residential flagship Imagine. The 17MKE on this page is highlighted; each other profiled plan links to its own page. The full family runs more than thirty floorplans; the highest-demand layouts across XLS and the flagship line are detailed here and the rest are catalogued on the line hub.

This floorplan carries its water comfortably. A full 37-gallon fresh tank is roughly 21% of the 1,474-pound cargo capacity, leaving the Imagine XLS 17MKE with a usable gear budget even when you tow full.

The published dry tongue weight of 517 pounds is 11% of the 4,921-pound dry weight, which sits inside the 10–15% band usually quoted for stable towing. It is still a dry figure: loading the front pass-through and the fresh tank both push it up.

Nothing above changes the ceiling. Loaded to its 6,395-pound GVWR the Imagine XLS 17MKE is towing 1,474 pounds more than its 4,921-pound dry figure, and that is the number your vehicle has to be rated for — not the brochure weight.

Tank balance is generous here: 37 gallons of fresh against 45 grey and 37 black, so waste capacity keeps pace with supply and the fresh tank is the constraint that ends a dry stay.

Of the 8 Imagine floorplans profiled here, the Imagine XLS 17MKE is the lightest by GVWR at 6,395 pounds — the entry point to the line and the one most likely to suit a vehicle already at its limit.

Either side of it in the same line: Imagine XLS 22RBE is 600 pounds heavier at 6,995 lb GVWR.

Against the Imagine XLS 17MKE: the Airelume 260 is 4 lb heavier and 7 ft longer; the Jay Feather 19MRK is 5 lb heavier and 1 ft longer and sleeps 2 fewer; the IBEX 19BRK is 17 lb lighter and 3 ft longer. Those are differences in the published numbers only — what they cost, how they are built and how they live are separate questions each of those pages answers on its own terms.

Those are the nearest travel trailers from other lines by weight — one per line, picked by proximity on that figure and nothing else. They are listed so the same tow vehicle can be checked against real alternatives, not because they are equivalent inside; layout, build and price diverge sharply across that group.

For scale, the Imagine floorplans profiled here run 4,921 to 8,725 pounds dry and 22 to 37 feet of exterior length across 8 plans. Where a floorplan falls in that spread usually says more about which vehicle can tow it, and which site it fits, than the layout name does.

Every profiled floorplan in this line, with the full weight table, is on the Imagine line hub.

This catalog tracks 18 specification fields per floorplan. Named sources publish 16 of them for the Imagine XLS 17MKE. The rest are not shown, because the alternative is reading a figure across from a sibling floorplan or from what the segment usually does — and a number nobody published is worth less than an admitted gap.

Not published for this floorplan: slide count, tire specification. If you find one of these in a manufacturer document for this plan, it belongs on this page.

The completeness figure at the foot of this page (97%) measures the same thing on the full field set: it is a measurement of how much this floorplan’s manufacturer publishes, not of how much research went into the page.

How every figure here was sourced and checked is set out on the methodology page.