BNIM Container Home

We are very excited today to have a guest author to the Saner Container.  This author not only lives in a container home, he has shown it to the world on MTV’s “Cribs”.  Sam Glassberg presented his home on “Cribs”, showing off the versatility and eco-friendly aspects of their shipping container home.  Now he has shared some of his experiences with the Saner Container.

As a film and television student, being on a real television show was probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life. It was also created one of the most awkward experiences of my entire life when a complete stranger came up to me in my college’s dining hall and said “I saw you on Cribs. I really liked your house”. Awkward for me because, well, I think that would be pretty awkward for anybody, but also amazing because I realized that people I don’t even know and didn’t tell to watch (probably the most I’ve tweeted or facebooked in my entire life) appreciate what my mom created.

I live in a house made of shipping containers. Weird. It’s a bit like a circus at times with the amount of people stopping to look at it on the street, and the amount of tours I’ve had to give, but I really love it. At first the idea seemed a bit crazy, but now it’s bizarrely normal. The house is composed of concrete, 5 shipping containers, glass, and metal and is truly a work of modern architecture. With geothermal heating, passive solar heating and lighting, and other recycled materials it’s also a house that gives back to the environment. It’s a structure to be envied by all, and luckily for those who envy it, it will soon be available for everybody to have.

Living room dining room and hall

In collaboration with local Kansas City architecture firm BNIM, my mother has begun creating new living, working, and retail spaces that will be available and affordable for nearly anybody. While my house is perfect in my eyes, new designs and configurations of this prefab design are going to be released in many different forms. It’s bespoke living. Studio apartments, dorm rooms, vegan restaurants, and boutique hotels are all ideas my mom had that are about to become a reality. If you can dream it, Debbie Glassberg and BNIM can build it.

For pictures and more information on Sam’s house, check out some of these links, pictures – and of course the MTV video:

KMBC, Kansas City’s ABC affiliate, ran a series on the Glassberg’s home. Follow their home being built:

KMBC – 1st story
http://www.kmbc.com/news/18414304/detail.html

KMBC – 2nd story
http://www.kmbc.com/news/20004971/detail.html

KMBC – 3rd story
http://www.kmbc.com/news/23860045/detail.html

KMBC slideshow
http://www.kmbc.com/slideshow/news/23858878/detail.html

Exterior

Den

Kitchen

Bedroom

Camoflaged 20'

You have used containers at work or during building a home.  You love to hunt.  You don’t have a cabin on your land.  Enter – the connex box.  Drop a container on your land, add in a door and some windows and you have a perfect hunting retreat.  Whether it is just a basic spot to base camp, or a complete man-cave, conex boxes offer all the flexibility and ruggedness to be a perfect hunting cabin.

You can insulate them, add in heat (or cooling, or both), add in features that make the cabin perfect for you.  It might be the ultimate get-away cabin for the guys or it might be a snug, welcoming place to bring your kids and grandchildren to teach them how to hunt.

Here is a series of my new favorite hunting cabin.  I got these by email from a colleague.  If you know anything more about this cabin, please let me know!

It starts with 2 used containers

Seal up between the containers

Archway in the living room

Use cut outs as overhang

Interior work

More interior work

Living room and bedrooms

Living room and kitchen

Finished Exterior

CargoBar - A container bar

According to Stuff.co.nz, storage containers have been used in the “Restart the Heart” program to reopen retail shops destroyed in the city’s earthquake.  Containers were used for various retail shops, including clothing, a wine store, a café and bar.

CaffeineLaboratory - a container cafe

Rather than plunking down containers, the group has used brought in Christchurch architects from the Australasian Buchan Group to create unique configurations to suit the needs of the shops.  In addition,

containers have been used to prop up buildings, including the cathedral and for various offices, homes, etc.

Also, a group is creating art on and over containers, seeing them at a large canvas new to the city.

TheVillageGrape - a cargo wine shop

For more information, check out the coverage from Stuff and 3 News.

Container artwork in Christchurch, New Zealand

La Boite cafe at sunset

Containers move.  Containers make great, green, building blocks.  But what about containers making great, gree building blocks that move?  Well, for those of you who want to take your container building on the road, we have some ideas for you!

La Boite's open design

Container Café

Austin, TX is known for doing things their own way and food trailers, enter a great combination of both – La Boite café.  It is a movable restaurant made from a 20’ container.  The café incorporates green practices, down to the spray insulation in the container.  Not only is it a fun, clean design, they have really maximized the space available to them to make an inviting café.  Check out these links for pictures of how they made the café, what it looks like now and more information on the spray insulation.  Spray insulation is a great option when using building with containers.  The insulation can get into the corrugation to provide extra insulation throughout and is also a great way to control the r-factor of the insulation without having to give up interior space in the container.

Micro-living

Cargotecture in Menlo Park

HyBrid Architecture’s Cargotecture series is a wonderful example of micro-living.  Bringing designs down to smaller sized structures idea for remote areas such as cabins, backyard retreats or offices or anywhere you want to have a temporary or permanent structure.  They were recently in the news for partnering up with Sunset to become Sunset’s Cargotecture^® home.  HyBrid is really doing things right with these efficient designs that can are mobile, easy to install and come in a range of sizes to fit various budgets and needs.

Mobile Wildlife Clinic

Dwyer Technical Services designed a wildlife heath care for Massey University.  The unit is made from a 40’ container and is a mobile unit that can move to where oil spills affect wildlife.  The mobility allows experts to reach wildlife quickly and onsite, making it that much easier to help animals in need.  Dwyer Technical Services announced  their first international export – to Maritime New Zealand, where a similar unit will help Australian wildlife.

ECOTECH Design Mohave Container Home

Container architecture is hot!  And with good reason – containers provide a great, green building block for a building.  Using cargo containers that have already spent years shipping goods around the world are repurposed as the foundation to cool architecture.  Check out these project for some fun ideas for your own container project.

Here is a hybrid home in the Mojave Desert from ECOTECH Design – part modular, part customized, with green features like a living roof, solar power and other great green options:

HOME Contained Glassberg Container Home

Here is a beautiful home in Kansas City, designed by HOME Contained and Debbie Glassberg that really shows what great planning and great design coming together can do.

Check out the slide show for more details and great pictures of the project from initial jobsite to beautifully decorated home: http://www.flickr.com/photos/homecontained/show

Just keep in mind that architects designed these projects.  If you are building a home, you will need an architect or engineer the same way you would if you were building a traditional building.  The last thing you want is for your cool new home to collapse on you!

Fire Training Grounds

Fire departments around the country look for useful, safe, cost-effective ways to practice fire training.  One good, reusable option – containers.  The containers provide a steel structure that can easily be modified to recreate real life situations and the containers can be burned over and over again.  Fire departments can add on more containers over time to expand their training grounds.

Fire Training Building

One department that has been working on creating a safe way to practice is the Sylva Fire Department in Sylva, NC.  Sylva FD purchased two 20’s and two 40’ containers last summer and have created a training ground.  They have plans to expand these training grounds as funds and time permits, but in the meantime, they are off to a great start.  They shared these pictures with me so I could share them with other fire departments thinking of doing the same thing.

Fire training containers

Getting ready for another phase of fire training grounds

Eco-Restaurant Greenhouse by Joost

Containers provide a secure, easy way to install a temporary building just about anywhere.  They are easy to modify to personalize to your needs.  Some uses include:

• Temporary, ground-level offices
• Cabin
• Hunting lodge
• Restaurant (see here)
• Portable retail space
• Temporary housing
  

  Quick, easy building

• Hotels
• Workshop
• Tool Crib
• Artist studio
• Any time you need a roof over your head – quickly.

Container buildings can be as fancy or as basic as you want.  Currently they are a popular, green building material in the architectural world.  But they can also be as basic is throwing a door and window on a container and calling it the office.

A couple of things to think about while you plan

Large shop made with containers stacked 2-high to accomodate trucks and containers

1)      Do you need an architect or engineer? If this is housing and you are removing large portions of the container or you are stacking modified containers, then YES.  Don’t risk it, make sure your plan will work once you pull that wall off the container and avoid disaster.  If you are living in the container, you will still need electricity, plumbing and all the other features you expect from a tradition building.  That takes some know-how.

2)      To insulate or buy insulated? As a general rule of thumb, only get an insulated container if you are using it to keep something at a steady temperature.  If you are modifying it, get a non-insulated container.  Insulated containers are expensive and very hard to modify.  Save your wallet and a headache by modifying a standard container and insulating once that is done.  Don’t forget to insulate the flooring and roof!

Inside the shop

3)      Modify yourself or have someone else do it? If you can weld, doing some easy modifications yourself is a great way to save money.  Use container modification kits to add doors, windows, skylights, AC/Heat or other basic additions.  If you have more complicated modifications – taking out container walls and adding in extra support, adding in industrial flooring, etc – bring in the pros.  These are headaches or possible structural problems you don’t want to handle on your own.  Have a container shop take care of doing that for you.

You are only limited by your imagination – and the laws of physics – in coming up with the container building of your dreams.

48' containers are longer than standard containers

I don’t normally do blatant advertising in this forum, but given the scarcity of containers these days, it is just fun to have a lot of containers to sell.  So please indulge me.

48′ Domestic containers are containers that are only used within the United States by rail and truck.  They are not used for international shipping.  Currently, we have a large number of 48′ long units available in Chicago, IL.  As you can see from the pictures, these are in great condition.

Containers this size do not come up on the market in this kind of quantity very often, so it is a great time to take advantage of a nice, secure, extra-large container!  Perfect for on-site storage, extra inventory, shop for inclement weather, and much more!  Call today for more details.

48' interior - in good condition

Just a few of the 48's we have available

Sample plate for this series

More interior shots

Call today to find out more about these containers – 877.374.5452.

Disney's TRON home

Containers are making a splash in movies lately.  Sure, they have always been a great backdrop for dangerous encounters “down at the docks” for that renegade cop who is solving the latest mystery.  But lately, containers are coming more into their own.  The latest cameo is in TRON: Legacy.

Interior of Disney's TRON home

In TRON: Legacy, Sam Flynn, son of the creator of TRON, lives in a home made from containers.  Disney went with a distressed-industrial look for the home which opens up for a spectacular view of Vancouver for a critical conversation in the movie.  According to Jetson Green :

“The shipping container house style was chosen because [director Joseph Kosinski] and our production designer, Darren Gilford, couldn’t find a house for Sam Flynn in Vancouver with suitable architecture and as designers both were interested in retro-fitted shipping containers as living spaces”

20th Century Fox's A Team

It is nice to see container architecture getting a nod.  They are a great green option for unique building materials.

Containers were almost extras in 20^th Century Fox’s A-Team. After hijacking a container delivery, the team has to prove their innocence.  The finale is at the LA Port where the A Team uses containers in order to prove their innocence, but not before many containers are destroyed.

20th Century Fox's A Team

Even the small screen is getting in on the action.  On TNT’s Leverage, one episode was centered on tracking a container full of cash. (See link below)  Despite being safe storage options, particularly with the lockbox on the containers in this clip, Super Cubes does not recommend storing large quantities of cash in containers.

TNTs Leverage The Homecoming Job

Containers long have been a backdrop for movies, but it is nice to see they are finally getting their close-up.  I wonder how they would show up in a fluffy romantic comedy–maybe a couple on the run from the law will hide in a container used for farm storage or spend a weekend in a container home on the beach. When that happens, you’ll be sure to read about it here.

This week we went to see what a shrimp farm in the desert looks like!  Enjoy the pictures.

If you have a large project that involves modifications, we can help you too!

Containers make up the tanks

Getting the tanks ready

The great team that is making the farm happen!