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All Photos/exterior/building type : house/building type : shipping container

Exterior House Shipping Container Design Photos and Ideas

Located on New Zealand’s North Island along the Coromandel Peninsula, this timber-clad shipping container house by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects captures the simplicity of living with nature. An open-plan layout extends the interior toward the surrounding landscape and ocean, while a built-in mechanism reveals a drop-down deck on one side of the unique holiday home.
Owner Stacey Hill was instantly drawn to this shipping container’s existing blue color and chose to leave it unchanged. Architect Jim Poteet added floor-to-ceiling sliding doors to allow light in, as well as a cantilevered overhang to shade a window on the left side, which houses a small garden storage area.
Transforming shipping containers into habitable spaces is a growingly popular subset of prefab. Just off the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, Martha Moseley and Bill Mathesius adapted an unused concrete foundation to create a home made from 11 stacked shipping containers. "We were inspired by the site, and our desire to have something cool and different," says Moseley.
Tomecek Studio’s Container House in Nederland, Colorado, is a 1,500-square-foot residence anchored into a rock outcropping. The dwelling—which comprises two insulated shipping containers clad in fireproof plank siding—is powered by photovoltaic rooftop panels and takes advantage of passive solar strategies to keep energy demands to a minimum.
For Bret and Dani Stone’s house in Santa Barbara, California, Barber Builders erected a concrete-and-steel ground level capable of supporting a second story made mostly of shipping containers. While the project as a whole took 19 months, the containers were craned into place in a single day in 2016.
Amagansett Modular House by MB Architecture
Sited on a typical 25-by-100-foot corner lot in Brooklyn, this 5,000-square-foot residence was built with 21 stacked shipping containers cut diagonally along the top and bottom to create a step-like structure with four tiered levels and a small pool between the two lower levels.
A glassed-in walkway connects the open-plan living areas to a separate bedroom wing.
The architecture follows the natural contours of the wedge-shaped site: the building is placed on higher ground on the site’s wider east end, while exterior decking steps down to the pool to the west.
“The structural design of the 10' pop-out on the second floor is unique. There are no beams under it—it looks afloat,” explains Behrooz, who notes that the pop-out was originally cut down from a 20-foot container. “Technically it is not a cantilever—but it is structured from the top (roof) and held back in tension, down to the foundation on the opposite side. It’s kind of a structural breakthrough—we used the inherent structural strength of the containers to our advantage.”
The architects applied BM marine-grade paint to the containers’ corrugated metal walls. The home is deliberately compact to match the scale of the neighborhood homes
A glimpse into one of two bedrooms housed in the single, 40-foot container placed on the north side of the site.
The container house is designed to wrap around an existing oak tree.
The units were designed to accommodate green roofs, which were part of the initial design intent, but put on hold for budgetary reasons.
The project is designed to encourage outdoor living and communal interaction among residents. In addition to the central gathering space, front-facing porch swings and covered outdoor spaces nudge homeowners to relax and socialize.
AHMM kept 10 existing trees and introduced other local plants that would be able to absorb rainwater runoff from the buildings, paths, and paving.
The car ports at Squirrel Park were designed to segue from the street to the lot entrance, which then leads to a central green space. The ports can also accommodate solar panels in the future.
Known as the "project that kicked off Cargotecture," Hybrid’s Studio 320 was fabricated in 2004 and delivered to Enumclaw, Washington. The interior is lined in reclaimed plywood formerly used on the bleachers of a local high school gym.
Clad in white HardiePlank siding, the duplex was designed to mimic the industrial look of the shipping container extensions.
Established in 1997, Artisans Group in Olympia designs modern homes throughout the greater Seattle and Portland areas. Their design-build models allow the company to provide full design services, and thanks to a partnership with Phoenix Haus—a Passive House panel fabricator—they are now able to develop Passive House prefab homes.
M02 by HONOMOBO
Workshop and Golf Tees by Back Country Containers
160-square foot Writer's Shack by Montainer Homes
Happy Twogether by Custom Container Living
Grannis Road House by Ty Kelly
Front Porch Living by Custom Container Living
Nine shipping containers form the basis of this new multigenerational house near Denver.
The two units in the duplex share a wall in the main house, so Rios continued the mirrored effect by placing the shipping containers side by side about 10 feet away from the home. Cut into the sides, the windows allow natural light to illuminate the shipping container and are designed to give parents a view of the kids playing in the backyard.
Rios asked architect Reynolds to derive a design from the shipping containers. The duplex takes the shape of stacked volumes clad with vertical and horizontal Hardie boards. The covered patio features clear-coated cedar wood.
Recently featured in the pages of Dwell Magazine, this contemporary home is built from five reclaimed shipping containers and is set into a lush Santa Barbara hillside.
The home exterior was recently sandblasted and painted with a ship-grade, high-gloss industrial paint.
The 40-foot-long containers hang 16 feet over the ground. The deep balcony, Gooden says, offers solar protection, keeping strong sunlight out but letting natural light in. The home has three bedrooms, a den, and three and half baths.
The site-built lower level, erected by Barber Builders, connects to the terrace via corner glass pocket doors.
Beautifully designed, these mobile structures are composed of high-quality materials at a more budget-friendly price, along with transportable, easy-to-assemble components.
The end elevation displays the shipping container structure and original doors.
The property was meant to fade into its surroundings, which it does at a distance.
A deck on the southside of the home is the perfect place to take in the ocean view.
One end of the home connects to the existing access path, which helped make construction to the site as minimal as possible. Edwards also positioned the property so that a studio space could be built below in the future.
The two ends of the containers can be opened or closed at this pivot for more or less privacy. Native plants will grow on the roof and northside of the structure.
Based in Wynwood, Florida, Wyn-Box constructed their model container home out of two used cargo containers. The 640-square-foot, one-bedroom showroom was designed by architects Ruslanas Byckovas and Ethan Royal with Ryan Anderson, a business developer, and boasts a stainless steel kitchen, porcelain gray tile, and a modern, clean gray exterior.
Functioning as a vacation rental for tourists, entrepreneur Rick Clegg combined old shipping containers to create a four-bedroom home with an eco twist near Palm Beach, Florida. Because of the container's inherent durability, they meet Florida's stringent construction standards, and the compactness of the home, the low carbon footprint because of the use of the recycled, prefabricated containers, and the home's proximity to the Loxahatchee River, make it ideal for ecotourists.
The front door to the units.
Three environmentally friendly container homes.
Franceschi Container Houses are three independent living units totaling 2,260-square-feet, built from used, 40-foot high cargo containers placed side by side.
Hill’s 1962 orange Mercury Monterey complements the blue of the container, whose original opening was retained on one end as the entrance to the garden storage shed.
The containers’ sides and ends were removed to make way for large, aluminum-framed clerestory windows that provide sweeping views of the east and west.
Solar panels mounted on a shipping container onsite (not pictured) heat this curvy house in Tasmania. The swooping roof cantilevered over the west-facing desk mitigates the intense afternoon sun.
The sleek 320-square-foot MEKA home, designed by Jason Halter and Christos Marcopoulous, when it was set up in New York. The home is made of cedar paneling, set over a steel shipping container.
The home was built by two construction workers and the couple themselves, who were familiarized with the construction process and had backgrounds in industrial engineering. “We did not have blueprints for this design, and created only a 3-D model to guile them along the way,” Saxe says.
Two converted shipping containers (left) now house offices for Shoup’s design/build firm. “Perhaps the most successful aspect of turning this into a place to live and an office rather than just have this shop space was moving it towards real indoor-outdoor living,” he says. Taya Shoup, a landscape designer, has refined her husband’s vision for the property with a courtyard and plantings. Photo by building Lab inc.
The 800-square-foot house is among the first shipping container residences in San Diego County, according to Mike. He hopes it will soon by joined by a larger container home on the property, at which point it will become the guesthouse.
This beautifully designed container home with incredible backdrop was built from a mixture of 20 ft shipping container and 40 ft shipping container by architect Narongdej Nilapat.
The recycled shipping containers were sourced from the Pacific Port of Caldera in Costa Rica. “Discarded shipping containers are all over the world and cost relatively little,” Saxe says. “With a bit of creativity and understanding of local building techniques, the interiors can be modified for any client.”
The firepole is an extra amenity the client always wanted to include in his home.
One of the main draws of Kevin Freeman and Jen Feldmann’s house is its connection to the neighborhood, which is why the front porch was a must. “Homes that have a door but no outside space say, ‘I’m not interested in you,’” designer Christopher Robertson explains. “This says, ‘I’m here to be part of the community.’”
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