Small Home Design

Just a few short years ago, living in a shipping container was considered to be a slightly upmarket version of living in a dumpster. Now, however, containers are being recycled for housing purposes across the globe, with a remarkably chic reputation being attached to the practice. Readily available, affordable, easily weatherproofed, roomy, conveniently expandable, and unsurprisingly easy to ship, they might just take off.The derelict shanty cities of empty containers surrounding most major ports mirror the story of trade deficits. Their inexpensiveness is their downfall: across long haul trade routes, it’s comparable in price to buy a new container on one’s own side of the ocean than ship the old unit back empty. So their abundance, coupled with their stackable structural integrity, has stirred many an architect’s creative juices.