Old Lady House

Travel about 50 miles west of New York City and you’ll find an idyllic country life with a slower pace, less traffic, and more space. And you’ll also find this magnificent shipping container home in Califon, New Jersey, set on a scenic three-acre lot. The home has been featured in magazines around the world as a prime example of what a luxury shipping container home can offer.

It’s one of the larger container homes we know of, and though its design is simplistic in form, it’s luxurious in practice. It starts with two rectangular buildings connected by a central courtyard and a sky bridge on the second level.

The Old Lady House helped to launch famed container home architect Adam Kalkin into the public view. We unfortunately don’t have any idea how the name ‘Old Lady House’ came to be, leaving us to assume it was just an exercise in irony given the boldness and grandness of the home.

You enter the property from the south, but the driveway curves and does a 180 so that you actually enter the house from the north. There’s a huge stainless steel door opening to a foyer/breezeway that is filled with light from storefront glass that stretches all the way across the width of the courtyard.

From here, you can enter the east wing to your left or the west wing to your right. While the east and west wings seem to mirror each other, there are actually distinct differences in both their construction and floor plans. 

The east wing’s first floor is made of concrete and is effectively a three-sided basement cut into the side of a hill. The remaining side is full of glass and faces the courtyard. The second floor of the east wing is made of three 40 foot shipping containers set parallel to each other. Upstairs you’ll find a media room, two offices, a full bath, and a kitchen. Note that this reflects a few slight changes from the original floorplan shown in the images below.

Over in the west wing, the ground floor holds the main living, kitchen, and dining spaces along with laundry room, bathroom, pantry, and dining nook. The second floor is where you’ll find the master bedroom and bathroom along with two other bedrooms connected by a jack and jill bathroom and accessed via a hallway that doubles as a library.

On the back of the home is an exterior metal sky bridge or catwalk that connects the second floor of both wings. It’s the only way to transit between the two wings unless you go downstairs and cross through the breezeway or the courtyard.

That courtyard is the central feature that most of the public areas of the home face. Lined with bluestone rocks and surrounded by the wings and breezeway of the home, it feels open yet private at the same time.

The home is full of luxurious touches that make it clear this is no cheaply-built box home. The kitchen has high-end appliances, like a Miele dishwasher and Viking range, plus custom wood cabinets and a 12-foot long stainless steel island. Bathrooms get similar treatment, with more custom cabinets and high-end fixtures.

There are also custom-made steel staircases and even bits of mahogany and fir for some of the flooring and doors. And despite the way that the exterior of the home practically yells “shipping containers” at you, the interior has premium finishes in every area that completely cover the containers’ corrugated walls.

It’s a home that seamlessly blends modern, industrial, and rural into one cohesive property. Exotic woods, stainless steel, CorTen steel, and concrete all work in concert to make this home come alive.

As you can tell from the pictures below, the home underwent a bit of a renovation. The exterior was sandblasted and repainted with an industrial gray paint that lightens the color palette a bit. And as previously mentioned, a few of the rooms in the east wing saw their purposes shifted slightly.

This work was presumably undertaken because the home was recently placed on the market for sale. And in August 2021, it sold for $867,500. While it’s a hefty sum, given the proximity to New York City, the 3+ acre lot, the almost 4000 square foot size, and the luxurious finishes, the buyers probably got a pretty good deal.