Fabrication yard, Portland, Oregon
Fixed-price contracts before any steel is cut
+1 (503) 555-013400Container homes, Pacific Northwest
We buy retired shipping containers, strip them back to the frame and rebuild them as permitted, insulated, fixed-price homes. Nine to twenty weeks in the yard. One to four days on your site.
Ridgeline 40/Hood River, Oregon
The utility company declined to quote a connection. So we sized the house around a battery instead, and the bank has not dropped below forty per cent in two winters.
01Why build with us
A shipping container is engineered to hold 60,000 lb stacked nine high and cross an ocean in a force 10. We keep that frame, treat the weathering steel and build the house inside it. Nothing we add is weaker than what we started with.
Closed-cell foam is sprayed directly onto the corrugation, so there is no cavity for air to move through and no thermal bridge at the ribs. Every unit is blower-door tested in the yard before it leaves.
Ninety per cent of the work happens under a roof on a level floor with the right tools. Weather does not stop it and your neighbours do not hear it. Install day is a crane, a crew and a connection.
Every layout starts from a standard shell and moves. Openings, partitions, service runs and finishes are all decided in the drawing set, which is where changes are cheap, rather than in the yard, where they are not.
02Design gallery
The smallest thing we will put our plate on.
A single 20 ft high-cube stripped to the frame, re-insulated with closed-cell foam and finished in birch ply. One room that reads as three because the ceiling never drops and the glazing runs corner to corner.
A long room with a good view at each end.
One 40 ft high-cube read as a single corridor of light. Kitchen and bath sit in a service band at the centre so both ends stay open, and a 9 ft ceiling keeps the volume from feeling like a hallway.
Two boxes, one uninterrupted living floor.
Two 40 ft high-cubes welded side by side with the shared long wall removed and replaced by a moment frame. The result is a 16 ft wide open plan with no column in the middle of the room.
The upper box hangs eleven feet past the lower one.
Three containers in an L, with the upper 40 ft cantilevered 11 ft over the entry to make a covered arrival and a first-floor terrace. The overhang is the shading strategy, not a styling exercise.
Sized around a battery, not a grid connection.
A 40 ft high-cube with a 6.4 kW array on a purpose-built frame, a 20 kWh battery in a conditioned bay and a plant room sized so you can service it standing up. Engineered for exposed ridge sites.
It arrives on a tilt-bed and leaves the same way.
A 20 ft unit built to be craned onto a prepared pad and taken away again when the lease ends. Everything is bolted, nothing is poured, and the whole thing runs on a 4 kW array and a composting head.
Full specifications, features and starting prices for every model.
03How it happens
3 to 5 weeks
We start with your site survey and a standard shell, then move walls until the plan works. You get a full drawing set, a fixed specification and a price that does not move unless you move it.
4 to 12 weeks
We submit as a permanent dwelling, not a temporary structure, because that is the application that gets approved. Our drawings carry the engineer stamp your building department is looking for.
9 to 20 weeks
The container is stripped to the frame, shot-blasted, re-primed and rebuilt in our yard. You get photographs every Friday and a walkthrough before it is sealed for transport.
1 to 4 days
Foundations go in while the unit is still in the yard. On install day a crane sets it, the crew makes the connections and you get the keys once the final inspection signs off.
04Sustainability
Every unit starts as a retired one-trip or Grade B container that would otherwise sit in a depot or go to the shredder. We buy the frame, not the trip.
8,000lb of structural steel reused per 40 ft unit
The array is sized against your actual load and your actual latitude, and the roof frame is engineered for it before the container leaves the yard.
6.4kW typical array on a 40 ft roof frame
Factory assembly, a reused frame and a small floor area compound into a build with substantially less embodied and operational carbon than a comparable stick-built house.
65per cent less construction waste than a site build
05From the people living in them
We were quoted fourteen months for a stick-built cabin on the same pad. Modern Concept set ours with a crane on a Tuesday and we slept in it on the Thursday. The price on the contract was the price on the invoice.
I write software in 320 square feet and I have never once felt like I was in a box. The ceiling height is what does it. Everyone expects a container to feel like a corridor and this does not.
The planning department pushed back twice and both times the answer came back from Modern Concept with a stamped calculation attached. That is the part nobody tells you about, and it is the part they were best at.
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06From the yard
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A free consultation is a real conversation about access, slope, zoning and budget, ending with a written view on whether a container home is the right answer for your plot. Sometimes it is not, and we will say so.
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