Since Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi builder Bill Lilly had been drafting ideas for building on the foundations of disaster so when the guest house of local Oxford residents Clarke and Amy Barton burnt down in a fire, they called on him to create something new on the old footing.

Using two twenty foot containers and one 40 foot high cube, he crafted a 1000-square-foot, three-bedroom home on a budget: the $90,000 of insurance money. With no experience building with retired cargo boxes, he picked up the smaller containers for $1500 a piece and $1800 for the larger one and spent $900 hiring a crane to place them according to his design.