Come get your container home. Assembly required, but apparently there's a market. The Easy Reader reports that a south bay architect/developer plans to offer up the stack-and-cut homes to the container loving individual who wants to pretend they've stowed away on a Chinese barge. Architect Peter DeMaria has built his first model home in Redondo Beach, and with the launch of his company Logical Homes, will offer six more models of container homes.
“The containers themselves, you and I can go purchase one right now for $1,500 per,” DeMaria said. “It varies on the amount of modifications we make to the containers, but by the time all is said and done, the final homes are anywhere from $125 to $150 per sq. ft. Now, in the South Bay, any client who sees this says, ‘Look, if you can build me a home for $125 a sq. ft., I’ll have five of them.’ It’s a big issue here. You can build a home in Rancho Cucamonga or Monrovia and all the material costs are the same and the labor costs are a little bit less, but contractors come here to the South Bay and they think, well, ‘If you are wealthy enough to live here, we can jack up our prices up 20 to 25 percent.’ And people pay it, unfortunately. But many people didn’t buy in yesterday and are not wealthy and are looking for cost savings, so the cost savings [with a container home] is tremendous. The only thing you have to deal with is what I will call the stigma of the actual container. Because some people don’t want to live in a box.”
Towards that end, Logical Homes will offer at least a half-dozen different models. Some, like the Redondo house, will be more apparent in their use of containers. Others, however, will have “skins,” such as concrete board, hardwood, and even shingles. The containers themselves will be cut into to create less boxy spaces. Much like the ongoing prefab movement, the idea of DeMaria's Logical Homes is to reduce costs by reducing waste, and finding alternative construction materials. So that's what its come down too? We're all so poor, we're forced to live in the same cargo containers used to ship the overpriced sneakers we have on our feet.
· Uncontainable, Part I [Easy Reader]