C-Home Hudson

Some architectural designers think of containers not as building blocks but as raw materials waiting to be sculpted into their final forms. The C-Home Hudson is a shipping container home outside of Hudson, New York that really embodies this simple yet powerful design idea.

Let’s start with the setting. The owners of this angular container home, Dave and Victoria, purchased a large plot of land in upstate New York back in 2016. They were living in Brooklyn at the time and wanted a place to get away from the city. This land, just a few miles east of the Hudson River, offered quite a retreat.

But initially, they were stuck camping on the property during weekend visits. With a desire to build a more permanent home and the encouragement of a friend-of-a-friend who ended up becoming one of the architects on the project, the family began to consider shipping container construction.

The architect already had conceptual designs in place for what they were calling the C-Home, a unique container home design available in various sizes. With Dave and Victoria fully on-board with the idea, the team started to refine the design and move towards construction.

At the time, Victoria was pregnant with their daughter Bowie. With the reality of a growing family, they decided to add two additional containers to the design for a total of six, effectively making the home eight feet wider than before. This change led to some adjustments and movements of rooms, but the general appearance and overall aesthetic of the home remained the same.

The design is simultaneously simple and yet ingenious, as many elegant solutions turn out to be. In this container home, you won’t find any cantilevers, bridging, or other bold structural changes that we often see in high-end container homes. Instead, the design is a three-plus-three design, with two levels of containers all parallel, adjacent, and even with each other.

But that’s where the fun starts. From this large rectangular form, angular cuts were made in the metal skin that were replaced with windows. If you follow the shape and direction of the cuts and pretended to fold the material down, you end up with something the exact size and location of the front wooden deck.

The same trick is employed in the back of the home, including the deck, except this time the cuts are slanted in the other direction. On top of the home is a roof deck which carries the cutting metaphor forward to this level as well.

There’s also a seventh shipping container on the property. Behind the home just across the back deck is this last container, used for storage and a photography studio, but not technically part of the home itself.

Dave and Victoria’s floorplan places the common spaces on the ground floor, like the kitchen, living and dining areas, and the half bathroom. Above are the private areas, with a slightly peculiar arrangement.

If you study the interior photos closely, you’ll notice there are actually two interior staircases. The master suite is accessed from one set of stairs, while the other staircase goes to the nursery, guest bedroom, and guest bathroom.

There’s no connection on the second floor between these two private areas, you must go downstairs then back up via the other set of stairs. Some might find the arrangement peculiar, but it does give a lot of seclusion.

And that amazing rooftop deck? You actually can’t access it from the interior. Rather, there’s a large exterior staircase on the end of the home that goes all the way put to this third-floor perch.

The construction of the home fully leveraged the flexibility of off-site fabrication. Individual containers were selected at a container depot in New Jersey, where they were cut and modified to create open spaces and specific rooms. The surfaces of the containers were sandblasted and allowed to get the rich orange patina you see in the pictures before a clear sealer was applied to prevent further deterioration.

Inside, many of the interior finishes were applied including the bathroom and kitchen build-outs. Six inches of insulation was placed on the exterior walls, and a water-based sealer was applied over the containers’ tropical plywood floors.

Meanwhile, at the building site, local contractors were at work on the land, prepping the foundation and utilities. Everything came together in August of 2019 when trucks hauling the six container modules were offloaded by a crane and the boxes were stacked in their final resting place. With just a few days of work, the containers were set, welded together, hooked to the utilities, and weather-sealed. This included adding the rubber membrane roof over the rigid foam insulation plus installing all the storefront windows.

The parallel tracks of local site work and factory fabrication meant the overall project took about half the time of a normal construction project with a similar size and scope. There were plenty of interior finishing touches, but the vast majority of the work had already been completed prior to the arrival of the containers. This also meant less construction work performed at the site that would have disturbed the peaceful serenity of the land.

It wasn’t all perfectly smooth sailing though, given that the C-Home concept had never been built before, and that a shipping container home didn’t fit neatly in line with the city’s building codes. But with careful coordination with city planners and inspectors, the team was able to get everything approved and installed without much delay.

You might be wondering what kind of couple would take on a project so creative and unprecedented? Victoria is a creative director and holistic health coach, while Dave is a writer who works in the music industry. It’s no surprise that the creativity and imagination they share in their professional lives would trickle down into their personal lives as well.

With a desire for a home that captured their artistic side, incorporated upcycling principles, and blended into their natural environment, containers just made sense to them. The home is a continual work in progress, with furniture and artwork being added throughout the home to capture their personalities. On the outside, they continue to expand the scope of the future of the property, with plans to add rental cabins and a farming operation.

We find this home particularly captivating because the angled cuts completely transform what would otherwise be a plain rectangular box. But let us know what you think about this design in the comment section!