Canby Riverside Container Home

Just north of the small town of Canby, Oregon you’ll find a tiny village known as New Era. New Era is a fairly unremarkable cluster of homes that sits right on the banks of the Willamette River, except for one fact: It’s here in New Era, Oregon that you’ll find an incredible shipping container home.

This entire area of the Willamette Valley just south of Portland is picturesque and full of wineries, so it made the perfect region for a riverside container home. This particular property sits right on the east bank of the river on the site of a former lumberyard. Whether you want to zip up to Portland on Highway 99 or enjoy the river access, you’ve got both options right at hand.

The design of this container house is based on one of the ways we previously shared that makes containers unique. We call it taking advantage of “the space between”, specifically referring to the area in between two parallel shipping containers.

In this configuration, you offset two containers apart from each other, then fill in the resulting gap with living space. You can often use the bottom rails of each container to support floor joists, and the top rails to support the roof. Then you add a couple of short end walls, and you’ve enclosed the space.

The ‘space between’ container configuration gives you the ability to have a large open area in your container home without using three or more containers. And, you get a larger floor area with less work. The main downside is that the traditionally constructed roof and end-walls of this middle space will need to be constructed on-site, even though the two containers themselves can be modified in another location.

With an understanding of the basic configuration of this New Era container home, let’s talk about the specifics. You’ll notice in the picture gallery below that there are two slightly different floorplans to view. The first floorplan is this actual container home as constructed, with an eight-foot-wide gap between the two containers.

However, the builder can expand that gap to an owner’s tastes, and they actually advertise a version of this home with a 12-foot gap instead. The process and amount of work required are basically the same, you just have slightly higher material costs…and an additional four feet of width to work with.

One of the things we love about the ‘space between’ configuration is that because it is traditionally constructed, you get an area of the home that isn’t inhibited by some of the constraints of building with containers. In this case, the builders used this middle section of the house to achieve a high-ceiling entryway, a small loft over the bedroom closets, and a set of clerestory windows that cascade natural light throughout the common spaces.

While there are certainly ways to stack multiple containers and cut out the floors and ceilings or turn a container on its end to get a vertical configuration, this specific design achieves the goal of natural light and open space effectively and efficiently. 

When you fully cut out the walls of a shipping container, you typically need to add material back to make up for the structural strength of the steel you removed. You may be able to get around this by making cuts that don’t go the full length of the container or adding columns along that length to provide support. 

In this case, the builder wanted the majority of the container walls to be free and open without segmented walls or columns to break up the view. To achieve that, they used large structural laminate wooden beams to provide this replacement support. These glulam beams were incorporated into the design of the home, not hidden, with a nice polyurethane finish that blends well with the wooden ceiling and other beams in the central part of the home.

And from this central part of the home, you can see almost everything. There’s the sliding glass door on the end plus the main entrance door out onto the porch. In between is the living room, surrounded by large picture frame windows.

Across the space is the modern kitchen which includes an island and dining nook tucked into the end of one container. The container’s eight feet of gross width is just the right size to hold a table with benches that can fit a family and guests comfortably.

Adjacent to the kitchen is a large wood-covered accent wall that also supports the sliding barn door leading to the home’s sole bathroom. The other end of the home features a tiny hallway that leads to both bedrooms. One has a walk-in closet while the other has a smaller reach-in closet with sliding doors.

And remember, you can climb up the ladder beside the bedroom hallway to access the small loft. Older kids would love this space that feels like an indoor treehouse, and it would also be a great place to enjoy a book or set a mattress for guests to sleep.

Outside the home, a number of site-build decks, porches, and patios surround the home. And with the river just feet away and great weather much of the year, it makes sense that this home would emphasize outdoor living.

Even though this home is certainly on the smaller side at about 900 square feet, it certainly feels like it would be liveable for a small family, pair of roommates, or another lower-level occupancy. And with features like the high ceiling, modern and rustic touches, unique loft, and expansive outdoor areas, you certainly aren’t going to be feeling squished or bored.

For people that haven’t caught the container bug yet, this home is a great introduction to cargotecture construction. It demonstrates that a lot of the preconceived notions some have about containers just aren’t true.

This container home has so much style and attention to detail inside and out and certainly doesn’t look or feel like a boring box. We hope you enjoy this container house design and get inspired by the different ways (and widths) that you could employ the space between design configurations for your own project.