Salida Shipping Container Home

Colorado is filled with scenic mountain towns and villages where locals and out-of-towners mix together while enjoying the scenic nature at their doorsteps. Salida is one such town, perched in Central Colorado’s Rocky Mountains at about 7000 feet in elevation and home to about 5000 or so people.

Visitors to Salida have several housing options, including this inspirational shipping container home. And visitors have increased in recent years, thanks to being named the ‘Best Unsung Mountain Town’ by Outside Magazine in 2017.

Just a mile or so outside of town, set up on the side of Methodist Mountain, you’ll find a container home that the owner Tommy Lorden sometimes refers to as the Northbound Train. It’s instantly recognizable from the dirt road out in front, with its bright orange exterior and huge porch. Lorden, a real estate professional in Boulder, created the bold container home after visiting Salida on fishing trips and falling in love with the town.

The home is built with three containers, all 40 feet long. They are set beside each other to form a 24 feet by 40 feet rectangle. Inside, the walls of the container are cut in various places to make several of the rooms wider than eight feet.

One look at the topography of the area makes it clear that flat building sites are hard to come by unless you will one into creation by doing extensive earthwork. However, because of the containers’ strength, the builders were able to set the containers on a pier foundation.

This provided several benefits. First, it raised the entire home up off the ground, making the scenic views just that much better. Second, it greatly minimized the amount of heavy equipment needed to move dirt around the site. Other than boring a few holes in the ground for the piers, the ground was able to be left relatively undisturbed, with the containers floating up above.

In addition to piers for the containers themselves, additional piers are used to support that massive front and side porch. It was a small amount of additional to work to create a breathtaking outdoor space that really extends the living area of the house.

Because of the elevation of the piers, entering the house from outside requires ascending a small metal staircase. It’s connected to a concrete staircase cut into the embankment, which takes you down the traditionally constructed garage.

Up the staircases, you land on the porch we can’t stop talking about. You’re already a couple of dozen feet above the driveway you used to enter the property, and you’re surrounded by mountain views. The porch is primarily on the front of the house, with a narrow walkway at the staircase, and a large wrap-around on the other side of the home that holds the hot tub. The single-pitch, slightly sloping roof has a fairly generous overhang around the perimeter of the home, so you could theoretically walk from the staircase to the home’s entrance without being rained on.

Once inside the home, you’re treated with an interior that feels somewhere between rustic and mid-century modern. Most of the walls have wooden paneling, a few touches like the antique refrigerator gesture back gently to the middle of the 20th century.

The combined living room, dining room, and kitchen take advantage of a space that is three containers wide. Where the walls of the container were cut out, metal beams were added for structural support and painted the same orange hue as the outside. Somehow, while the orange feels industrial and modern outside, it feels warm and inviting against the interior design inside the home.

The focal point of this open living space is the North corner, where a double sliding glass door on one wall meets a single sliding glass door on the other. Together, it’s over 20 feet of near-continuous glass looking out across Salida to the mountains beyond. The other interesting piece is the wood-burning stove. Functional and beautiful, it’s an anchor to the room even when it’s not burning.

The other end of the house is home to two bedrooms and two bathrooms. One bedroom has a large king bed, while the other has unequal bunk beds: queen below, and twin above. Coupled with the couch in the living room, there’s room for five guests in total, though four is more realistic for an all-adult group.

The wood paneling continues into the bedrooms and bathrooms in the rear of the house, maintaining uniformity in the appearance. No matter where you look, it feels simultaneously futuristic and retro.

One on hand, this container home is the picture of simplicity. Three regular containers are placed side by side, no stacking, cantilevers, or other impressive architectural feats are needed.

And yet, despite a plain rectangular floor plan, the execution ends up being far from ordinary. Everything from the exterior color, to the indoor/outdoor design, to the interior design all play a part in making this home truly special.

Thanks to the low-impact concrete pier foundation, a home like this could be built almost anywhere. A sloping site or floodplain location wouldn’t really matter. But by orienting the home towards the best view, you really allow the geography of the location to work with the home, not against it. And that, perhaps, is one of the greatest inspirations about this home.