Home building, with BOXES
Hamilton’s first urban shipping container house rises in under eight hours
It’s been a long time coming, but Geoffrey Young finally has a steel house in Steeltown.
The Redhouse, on Arkledun Ave. in downtown Hamilton, has been creating a buzz since eight 40-foot shipping containers arrived on flatbed trucks early last month. A crane stacked four containers on top of four others that were secured to a concrete foundation, and the 2,500-square-foot abode was formed. It’s believed to be the second urban shipping container home in Canada; the first was recently built in Toronto’s College and Lansdowne Sts. neighbourhood. The Hamilton house is more than twice as large.
“I am very happy. It’s a little more compact than I visualized, but it fits really well into the neighbourhood,” says Young, 40, who owns the house with his mother, Beverley, and will move into it with his wife, Wendy, and 18-month-old daughter, Ilia. “There’s really been a lot of positive interest in the house and it seems to strike a chord with Hamiltonians.”
The project planning began in 2012 when Young and his parents set out to try something innovative in urban development, and encourage municipalities and builders to explore more creative, sustainable housing solutions. Young, a writer/broadcaster and a relief responder in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, wanted a resilient building that could withstand severe weather events.
He purchased a downtown infill lot (vacant for 60 years) from the city of Hamilton. He recruited Toronto designer and certified sustainable building adviser with the Canadian Green Building Council, Jason Halter of Wonder Inc., to help him design the home after Young saw a small, off-grid project the designer had done in Brighton, Ont.
Storstac, an Etobicoke company that specializes in modifying shipping containers for building purposes, sourced and fabricated the containers.
Getting the four-bedroom home built on site wasn’t as easy as the design or fabrication process. Numerous hurdles arose; the thorniest issue was that water and sewer pipes for three neighbours’ homes ran through the property. Eventually, the problems were resolved, but Young estimates the delays and other costs (including storage of the containers) doubled the original $220,000 budget for the house (the lot was purchased for $60,000).
“The four years getting here was really insane,” Young says.
Fortunately, getting the containers to the site went like clockwork, with the eight flatbed trucks transporting the metal boxes from Storstac’s Etobicoke yard to the Hamilton lot.
“It’s the biggest house we’ve done, and one of biggest container buildings we’ve done, yet one of the smoothest installations we’ve done,” says Anthony Ruggerio, sales and marketing director for Storstac. “The first lift was at 8:30 a.m. and we were done by 4 p.m. Given the size of the project, it was a combination of good planning and some luck.” The windows and doors came next, with drywall, flooring, plumbing, wiring and finishes to follow. Young will do a lot of the work himself, along with licensed tradespeople and experienced friends. There has been a constant parade of curious passersby stopping to look at the Redhouse and chat with Young, who is staying in a nearby bed and breakfast until the home is habitable. While it complements its surroundings, the design that he collaborated on with Halter also looks different than the older neighbourhood houses.
“We came up with a really straightforward way to articulate the (building) envelope by reversing the orientation of the containers to show barn doors on every second unit, giving a checkerboard-like effect on the elevation,” Halter says. In response to the City of Hamilton’s Historical Preservation committee suggestion to break up the scale of the house, two containers were shifted forward and two back.
“The outcome was actually really great, as it makes the building look a little like a two-unit, party-wall townhouse building, while actually being a single family residence,” says Halter. “The client may consider taking it back to the city in the future to do just that.”
“This is the most adaptable building ever,” Young says. “It could even be a restaurant.” He says shipping container homes could also be a solution for hurricane-ravaged and floodprone locales: a hatch in the ceiling would allow access to a roof during flooding; shipping containers float and could be chained down to allow them to rise with floodwaters.
As many sustainable features as possible were incorporated into the Hamilton house, from the adaptive re-use of the containers, to a roof designed to accommodate a green roof, to soffit extensions that provide solar shading and solar gain protection. The house was painted with a zinc-rich primer, then red paint that’s aerospacegrade quality to resist fading and protect the corten steel envelope for years.
“We’ve seen a constant interest in container houses and are working on buildings all over Ontario, and have been since 2010,” says Halter. “We’re happy to see the evolving landscape in that regard.”