We switched from a rear kitchen model to a rear living room Aspen Trail 2910 (no longer produced) in 2013 primarily to get recliners and a little more space. We just moved into a Hemisphere GLX 273RL. It has two slides and lots of windows. Will have to see how that affects heating and cooling. It has theater seats instead of recliners. The Jury is still out on that. There are only two of us so replacing the sofa bed (which is not even bolted down because it can not move when the slides are in) with a recliner or two is an option for us.
In researching current trailer models, it seemed that to get recliners one had to go longer. I could not find a short rear living room trailer with the option to replace the sofa bed or jack knife sofa with chairs. Of course you could do it yourself. The Aspen Trail had the TV at the end of the dinette so that the recliners were directly facing it. You could look directly at the TV from one of the dinette benches or the recliners. The TV in the Hemisphere is directly opposite the theater seats. It came with a 50" TV which seems huge when you are only 6-8' away. The TV is on a swivel mount so it can be turned for better viewing from the sofa bed or dinette.
Another thing I noticed during my research was that the shorter trailers all had walk through bathrooms to get to the bedroom. We do not like that. The Aspen Trail had a door to the bathroom from the bedroom and another from the hallway. The Hemisphere only has a door from the hallway. There is a full length closet (which DW really likes) where the door from the bedroom would have to be. It also has a medicine cabinet which the Aspen Trail did not have.
It seems that about half the rear living models have two doors and half have one door. I think most of the two slide models had one door. The Aspen Trail had two, the Hemisphere has one.
The storage space in the two is about the same, but configured differently. The Hemisphere has an island sink so there are no cabinets over the sink. I added shelves in both units because the spaces were so tall that they wasted a lot of space. Adding a shelf at 10" in a 20" tall space makes the space more usable for us.
The refrigerator in the Hemisphere is in the slide. It is a 12volt model so ventilation of the cooling unit is not an issue. We do not dry camp a lot but the 2 golf cart batteries. 160 Watt solar panel and Yamaha 2400 should be sufficient to keep it running.
An issue with the two slides that I am still working on is that the dealer said there was not enough room between the awning and the slid to put a slide topper. We do a lot of camping in areas where the wind is an issue for awnings and rarely put the awning out on the previous two rigs. If given the choice I would have opted for a slide topper instead of an awning. The dealer suggested putting the awning out just enough to cover the slide. Time will tell how this works out.
A couple of other things I have discovered that have nothing to do with whether the unit is a rear living model. The Atwood water heater in the Aspen Trail could be switched from electric to gas from the control panel in the RV. The Suburban water heater in the Hemisphere has the switch to turn on the electric element in the outside access compartment. We used the electric most of the time in the Aspen Trail if not running the AC. You had to turn it off to run the microwave or a hair dryer for any length of time to avoid tripping a circuit breaker or the power pedestal. I liked the Atwood setup better. The Advent air conditioner in the Aspen Trail did not have a fan only mode and the unit shutdown when the set temperature was reached. The air conditioner in the Hemisphere has a fan only mode and two cooling modes. You can choose constant fan or have the unit shutoff when the set temperature is reached. I like the Hemisphere system better.
Good Luck in the search for the right trailer for you.
