Architect, artist, designer Julio Garcia had been designing plans for shipping container homes for a decade before he found the perfect place to build one: on a long, narrow stretch of his property in Savannah, Georgia. “I’m a big believer we should be adapting to the environment… I remember walking out and looking at the yard and thinking oh my god the land is calling for this linear design.”

He picked up two 40 foot shipping containers from the Port of Savannah and, thanks to much advance planning, he was able to install them without removing one tree from his property. He offset the two boxes, cut out the interior container walls and added I-beams, a shed roof and clerestory windows in the center to provide plenty of daylighting.

“There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re inside a container so in the design we had to address that. I’ve been in a couple of projects and they don’t function very well and you’re like, ‘Oh, I still feel like I’m in a metal box’.”

Garcia believes containers can make for affordable homes: “you could put up a structure like this for about 50K”, but much of the interior was salvaged from other job sites (i.e. the drywall and the kitchen). His Price Street Projects creates plans that are “almost do-it-yourself plans” for shipping container homes and he has installed commercial container spaces, but he believes the site should determine the plan.