Luxury Shipping Container Homes Are Coming of Age
Nathaniel Crawford
Luxury Real Estate Sales Partner & Family Office Advisor. Helping you achieve your real estate goals so you can live a more impactful life.
When you think of a luxury home, the images you see in your mind’s eye are likely full of marble or granite, slate or mahogany. You might envision post and beam or brick construction, or a meticulously restored old mansion.
What you probably don’t reflexively think of are corrugated metal shipping containers that once held bicycles, ladies’ sportswear, or thousands of microwave ovens.
But there are many people who can see posh potential in these oversized hollow Lego blocks, and their numbers are growing.
And why not? Cleaned up, containers’ straight lines and simple material have an industrial aesthetic, a modern vibe with wide appeal and limitless options. Painted in simple colors and minimally adorned, they can be beautiful but modest abodes meant to show off a stunning natural environment – or to extend that environment into a living space. Arranged cunningly or finished with high-end materials, they can become show-stoppers all on their own.
There is also something attractive about their economic and environment credentials, too. Used and treated carefully, old shipping containers repurposed for housing can rescue significant amounts of metal from landfills and save time and money on builds. With hundreds of millions of shipping containers in and out of service around the world, these substantial structures can be available used for less than $8 a square foot, ready to stack on top of each other and cut days or weeks from construction schedules as compared to traditional site builds.
While the potential to be earth- and wallet-friendly does indeed exist, these are not always drivers on luxury builds. It’s important to understand that innovative or interesting designs often use enough reinforcing or supplemental materials to offset any savings in cost or raw input. And many homeowners opt for new “one-trip” containers to reduce the uncertainty about contamination of the structure from unknown previous cargo carriage. Still, as you’ll see, some luxury homes do set high green standards… and hit them.
These five homes vary in their styles, sizes, and build approach, but all offer something luxurious to their inhabitants and something aspirational to their admirers.
This may be one of the better-known container home builds in the world – at least among fans of the British architectural reality show Grand Designs. A 20xx episode of the series tells the story of farmer-turned-architect Patrick Bradley’s project to turn a gorgeous river-view plot on his family’s land into the site of Northern Ireland’s first domestically designed and built container home.
Bradley’s design proves that a home doesn’t have to be huge to be luxurious. Coming in significantly under 2,000 square feet, his residence uses just four 45-foot containers to remarkable effect. The house’s astonishing cantilevered profile and its ultramodern finishes inside and out, from steel mesh to a gorgeous hammock-style bathtub, are surprisingly suited to this pristine setting.
Constructed in just 10 weeks from 14x20 shipping containers, the Lindendale’s bright white double-height interior offers huge windows, rich dark wood accents, and vast open spaces.
Rather than hide its industrial origins, this home celebrates them. There are no attempts to disguise the shipping container walls in any way. A simple bright white paint job over the exposed surfaces makes it abundantly clear where this home came from. The result: amazing light and a surprisingly welcoming feel.
Luxury means different things to different people. In some ways, the short-term residences at Cove Park in Scotland are plain and simple: no extravagant furnishings or finishes are evident. But this retreat for artists provides a different kind of luxury: time, space, and beautiful surroundings in which to find inspiration and focus on work.
Six containers lie side by side along the water. One end of each has been replaced by sliding glass doors opening onto a waterfront patio/dock. The other end holds porthole-shaped windows. The interior of each container has been painted a light color to maximize the effects of the natural light, and the plain furnishings let nature take the spotlight. The collective roof of the dwelling has been planted with sod, so from above, it blends back into its environment.
This suburban home is anything but your typical pre-fab number. Designed by Sebastián Irarrázaval for an art collecting family, it uses a dozen containers of varying sizes. Most provide living space, but one container was turned into the family swimming pool.
Set against the slopes of the Andes, the home uses some of its containers on an incline to provide raised sleeping platforms and generous skylights in the children’s bedrooms. Staggered containers on the same level provides visual interest and some privacy between rooms. Both this spacing and strategically placed floor to ceiling windows help blend indoor and outdoor space in the residence. And a sunken hot tub on the deck of one of the upper levels looks out over an amazing valley view of the outskirts of Santiago.
The ingenious design is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also optimizes air flow between and through the living space. Doors and windows are aligned between units to let mountain breezes move through.
Outside, the container origins are visible in the proportions and the metal finishes. Inside, the house still has a modern, slightly industrial feel, but it is not straight-up container style; instead, it is a little more subtle and a little more polished.
While we’ve already discussed that a luxury build doesn’t have to take sustainability or cost into consideration, it certainly can. Maria Jose Trejos did both in a 2013 build in Costa Rica.
The heart of Incubo House is literally a tree. Every room in the home has a view of the massive cedar that stands in the middle of the beautifully decked central courtyard. And that same tree donated material for the stairs and much of the custom furniture.
Natural materials abound to striking effect against the eight grey containers that form the primary structure. Bamboo screens provide shade and some privacy, but also lighten the face of what otherwise could look monolithic. As many of the other materials as possible were sourced in as eco-friendly a manner as possible: recycled plastic, certified sustainable woods. The house relies heavily on smart solar design and systems, and rainwater is recycled.
Plenty of glass and an open design around the centerpiece cedar make the house feel spacious and airy.
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