Can a Shipping Container Home Be Stylish? Check This One Out!

By Melissa Dittmann Tracey, REALTOR® Magazine

A shipping container for hauling heavy freight in trains, trucks, and ships isn’t often associated with anything glamorous. But the housing industry wants to prove otherwise.

This 3,000-square-foot home in Phoenix is made up of stacked shipping containers, but you’d never know it once you walked inside. It’s modern, open designed interiors matches the style and spaciousness of any other single-family home today.

Homes constructed of shipping containers are drawing more attention in the building industry. These homes are flood and fire-proof, eco-friendly, energy efficient, and there’s certainly no shortage of them to transform. Worldwide, an estimated 24 million empty shipping containers are retired, just waiting to find a new purpose. Could real estate be it?

Some housing experts predict shipping containers to make up a bigger footprint of homes and buildings in the future. One shipping container can be transformed into a tiny home, several molded together could form a standard-sized single-family home, and hundreds stacked together in a Lego-like way could make for an apartment complex. Shipping containers can also be transformed as add-ons to existing homes, such as a garage.

But can a shipping container be stylish? Shara Terry, a real estate pro with Berkshire Hathway HomeServices Arizona Properties in Phoenix, certainly thinks so. She’s listing a three-bedroom, four-bath single-family, shipping container home for $610,000. The home, which is a hybrid of two stacked containers on its east side and two stacked on its west side, is designed by engineer Jorge Salcedo and Colombian architect Gregorio Baquero.

“A lot of people who’ve visited it have been curious, and they can’t believe it used to be a shipping container once they step inside and they see how open and seamless it is inside,” Terry says. “There really are only two subtle reminders in the interior that show a portion of the red container,” but even those have been blended into the overall decor. The exterior includes some writing on the containers that were preserved for character, including a stamp in Vietnamese showing its former location.

Overall, the home’s industrial exterior blends to a more modern interior. Take a look at the staging by Kelly Hester with KH Staging and Redesign in Phoenix.

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