Get Inspired! Awesome DIY Shipping Container Home in France
Plans, designs and drawings are neat – but in action photographs is where we see the real wonder of shipping container home construction. Building becomes as easy as stacking giant modular metal LEGOs – prefabricated, pre-cut cargo containers already sized, scaled and structured to be transported.
Designed by architects Claire Helene Drouin and Jean Marie Sanchez – and appropriately set in an industrial part of a southern French city – this amazing container structure was, as you can see from the photos, assembled piece by piece on site after each shipping container unit was taken there by truck (after being shipped many times before by both land and sea vehicles).
Strangely enough, DIY used shipping container house plans have become so popular that there is a growing shortage in areas in terms of the used containers themselves – but for those able to find and buy them locally the actual building process is much cheaper and easier than most kinds of construction. There are lots of different ways to go about the process, with some choosing to disguise the containers and make them look like a more conventional building. Drouin and Sanchez decided to leave the containers in their raw and recognizable state.
“We decided some time ago to build our house,” say the architects. “Nothing could be more banal in times of both financial and environmental crisis. After discussions and given the environment (we are facing the autonomous port of Marseilles, facing south) a solution as strange as it is economical was imposed: ‘And if we built on the basis of containers!’. A clarification, she is an architect, he is a chatter actor! Both passionate about town planning, the memory of places and small human stories.”
For folks not interested in the interesting process of actually starting their own cargo container homes from scratch, there has also been a corresponding increase in shipping container homes for sale – the flip-side of the used container supply shortage. Pictures, plans and other building resources are also becoming more and more available in the industry.
