3327 Rutledge Street Container Home

Elements

3 Container(s)

Size

960 Foot²

Age

Built In 2019

Levels

3 Floor(s)
Address: 3327 Rutledge Street, Dallas, Texas, United States
Project Type(s): Single Family Residential
Bedrooms: 1
Bathrooms: 2

Note: Map location may not be exact. Click to open in Google Maps.

3327 Rutledge Street Container Home

Description

We’ve started informally calling this tall container home the Tower of Power for rather obvious reasons! It’s not often that you see a home that’s three stories tall, yet less than 1000 square feet. But shipping container construction makes it possible to economically build a tall home like this if you want.

Granted, a reasonable question to ask is “Why?” Why would you build up instead of out, when you have what looks to be a large lot?

It’s not a question we can definitively answer, but we have a few guesses. First is cost savings. You may find it hard to believe, but building up with containers may have actually been the cheaper option. Shipping containers are strong enough to stack, fully loaded, over seven units high. So, three is no problem. Additionally, going vertical makes for less foundation and roof work.

Another reason the builders may have built upward is to do something unique. If it doesn’t really cost any more to do something bold, why not try it? The home certainly has great views and has undoubtedly become a landmark in the neighborhood.

The third reason that this container home might have been built into a three-story home is related to lot lines and offsets. While we don’t have handy access to the specific requirements for this city lot, given its corner location and proximity to both a railway and major road, it’s possible that much of the land area was essentially unbuildable for a traditionally constructed home. That would also explain why it seems nothing was ever built here in the past, leaving a vacant lot.

Regardless of the reasons for this Rutledge Street container house and what you might think of them, this home was built and it is tall. So, given those facts, let’s talk more about its design and construction.

The home sits on a triangular-shaped lot at the corner of Rutledge Street and Trunk Avenue, surrounded by a sturdy wood fence with metal posts. Although the address and pedestrian access are from Rutledge, the vehicle entrance is actually on Trunk via a sliding gate. Just steps away is the 1.1 acre Liberty Park. However, the tranquility of the park is in tension with the noise you’ll probably encounter from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Light Rail Green Line just across the street, as well as the 6-lane Texas Highway 352.

Three forty-foot-long shipping containers were used to build the home. However, the ground floor container is completely open and not connected internally to the rest of the home. Instead, it’s more of a storage area, although since it is insulated and has its own mini-split HVAC unit, it could be used for a craft roof, exercise roof, etc.

It’s only when you climb the external staircase to the second floor that the home actually begins.

You enter the home in the kitchen, which has light maple-colored cabinets, granite counters, and modern stainless steel appliances. The kitchen is small and built entirely on the back wall of the home, providing plenty of room for circulation and transit between spaces. The floors throughout this level and the one above are all glossy coatings on top of the original shipping container plywood flooring.

To the right of the kitchen is the living room which not only has large windows on the front and back but a huge sliding glass door that takes up the entire end of the container. The container doors were welded open at 90 degrees and used to support a four-foot-wide porch just off the living room.

Walking back past the kitchen, you pass by a couple of small closets (including one with a stacked washing machine and clothes dryer) and an internal staircase as you head toward the bathroom in the far end of the container. With modern fixtures, white subway tile, and the same wooden cabinet faces as the kitchen, the bathroom is very inviting.

If you go up the staircase to the third floor, the landing places you at the very end of the top container, on top of the 2nd-floor bathroom. As you walk down the length of the container, you’ll pass a closet, a second bathroom, and finally the open, lofted bedroom. 

There’s tons of light in the bedroom with windows on all sides and another set of sliding glass doors opening to a balcony, similar to the one adjacent to the second-floor living room. However, because you have to walk past the bed to access the sliding doors and balcony, you’ll never be able to have a king-sized bed here. It’s a sacrifice you have to make with single-container width rooms, which typically come in just a hair over seven feet wide.

Despite its small size and narrow profile, the home seems fun and creative for the right owner. It is light, bright, and comparatively open with the 600-odd square feet of living space it has to work with. 

Thanks to its light-colored exterior, closed-cell spray foam insulation, mini-split HVAC systems, and energy-efficient windows, it should be comfortable even in the Texas summer. And you have electric instantaneous water heaters to provide endless hot water as well. It’s also a home that appears to have been built well, with a concrete pier foundation that keeps the containers off the ground (no flooding risk here), to the additional roof added over the top container that ensures you won’t have pooling water.

We’ll be honest, a home that is three containers tall but only one container wide is not going to be a great fit for a lot of potential container home owners. While it looks iconic and has great views, its livability is lacking for a lot of potential buyers. However, for the right person (probably a young professional who doesn’t mind climbing stairs or a lack of privacy), this could be a very cool property.

Like some other smaller container homes we’ve featured in Dallas, this home appears to have been built on property that was part of a City of Dallas program known as the Urban Land Bank Demonstration Program. The program enabled developers to cheaply purchase foreclosed properties if they agreed to build affordable housing. Thanks to that program, a piece of land that was basically useless will now make a beautiful, modern container home for someone.

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