Oregon City Container Home One

Just outside of Portland, Oregon you’ll find historic Oregon City. And here, clustered across three adjacent lots, you’ll find several remarkable container homes.

In this article, we’re discussing the container house at 1038 Prospect Street. Built in a T-shape, it makes use of two 20-foot containers and one 40-foot container. The arrangement gives added width to the normally narrow interior of a container while avoiding the subjective blandness of a perfectly rectangular floorplan.

That floorplan includes a large, open living, dining and cooking space, with bedrooms and bathroom off the side. It’s a small home with all the efficiencies that includes, while still being perfectly livable and delightfully modern. Upgrade touches like stainless-steel appliances and quartz countertops make this shipping container home look and feel higher-end than some people might expect. And the quality is there behind the scenes as well, with the home built to Oregon Energy Trust standards.

You may be wondering how these three similar-looking container homes came to be located so closely together. It turns out that the builder actually purchased a single large lot, and then was able to split it into three smaller lots. Next thing you know, you’ve got three adjacent container homes transforming a neighborhood.

A couple of unique aspects of this home are the wall bump-out and the roof. Bump-outs are occasionally used to provide added interior width in a localized area and involve cutting out a section of wall and cantilevering it off of the house by a few feet. It’s a simple way to get an extra bit of elbow room in a particularly narrow section of the home without adding an extra container.

As opposed to using the container built-in roofs (which can make draining problematic after combining multiple containers), a relatively flat roof with large overhands was built on top of all three containers. This gives plenty of shade from the overhead sun while adding volume for insulation and utilities that doesn’t take away interior headroom.

If you’re a fan of this container home design, we’d encourage you to also view Oregon City Container Home Two and Oregon City Container Home Three next door!