A container home being built in Westmont
Mary Jo Knapik is building what appears to be only the second shipping container house in the Chicago area.
Her house, under construction in Westmont, follows one a St. Charles couple finished last fall.
The house, which has been in the works since Knapik bought a vacant third of an acre on 55th Street in October 2016, began to look like its future self in early June, when cranes lifted one of the containers into place on a concrete foundation. Ultimately it will include two 40-foot shipping containers and one-and-a-half 20-footers, with about half the house built of conventional wood frame construction. Out front will be half of another container forming a courtyard.
“It’s a hybrid of a container house and traditional construction,” said the home’s architect, Chuck Seen, principal of RS2 Architects in Wheaton. The bedrooms, bathrooms and workout room will be in the containers, Seen said, while other rooms will be in the conventional part of the house. The combination, he said, grew out of their collaboration on the overall design rather than any inability to use containers for the whole house. J-Sek Construction, based in Oak Lawn, is building the house.
Shipping containers have been used in Chicago to create micro-stores for neighborhood retail startups and other commercial uses, and in Michigan a developer created a set of vacation cottages. There’s demand for houses, said Katherine Darnstadt, the architect whose Chicago firm, Latent Design, makes the micro-stores, called Boomboxes. “I get calls every week asking about it,” she said. But completed residential projects are rare. Containers are popular in cutting-edge architecture, largely for the reasons Knapik wanted to use them. “I like the industrial aesthetic of them,” she said, and “there’s the reusability factor” in an increasingly wasteful world.
Knapik didn’t set out to build an innovative house. She was looking for a house in a contemporary style in the western suburbs. Finding nothing that matched her vision of a relatively small contemporary home, she wound up buying the vacant lot on 55th for $115,000, and then set out to find an architect. She’d seen shipping containers used for roadside retail in Costa Rica and Hawaii. A Google search took her to Seen, who had worked on a few small projects that used containers.
“You don’t get a lot of people who want to commit to trying this,” Seen said.
One lesson she learned is that the “reusability” of containers is more aspirational than she knew. She was advised to buy unused containers, to prevent getting something that had become contaminated with formaldehyde, pesticides or other chemicals during their days in shipping.
Buying huge steel boxes new didn’t feel eco-positive, but she said, “I’m trying to feel less guilty about it, because the ones I bought were made in 2014 and had basically been sitting around since then.” The St. Charles couple, Stephanie and Clark Evans, who built their home through their firm group3 Construction, said they avoided the contamination problem by buying containers that had only been used to ship electronics.
A rendering of the Westmont container home
Darnstadt said most people don’t know that building with never-used containers is often preferable. In use for shipping, “they get nicked and banged and dented inside,” she said, “and every one of those gets in the way when you’re trying to build straight and plumb inside.”
Another lesson, Knapik said, is that she’s not saving money by building with containers. She declined to say what the total cost of the project is beyond the price of the land, but she said the total is comparable to what she would have spent to build conventionally. Seen said the smaller containers cost about $2,500 each, and the larger ones around $3,500. But add to that the cost of building a concrete foundation, delivering the containers via crane and attaching them permanently via welding and/or bolts to the foundation, and installing utilities and installation, “and it kind of evens out,” he said.
Knapik said she’s looking forward to moving into the house early next year. The bedrooms and bathrooms in the containers will have eight-foot ceilings, dictated by the height of a shipping container, but her workout space will have a 12-foot ceiling, thanks to stacking part of one container atop another.
While Knapik said that early on she "wasn't sure my heart was in a house made of shipping containers," now that it's coming together and promising to look sharp, "I'm enthusiastic."
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