David Boyle did not build his house out of shipping containers to be hip, though he does live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He left the water pipes exposed not in pursuit of an industrial chic aesthetic, but to make them easier to fix.

“This was about having a home,” Mr. Boyle, 56, said last week in his steel-walled living room, in the house that he and his wife, an architect who died of ovarian cancer in July, built largely by themselves. Their goal, he said, was not style, but a place immune to the neighborhood’s rising rents, built out of materials cheap enough that it could inspire other urban homesteaders to do the same.

With the price of land and construction ever rising, a vast majority of the numerous residential construction projects in Williamsburg over the past decade have been decidedly risk-averse in terms of design. Most developers have chosen the same loft-like, boxy, glass-and-steel look, creating could-be-anywhere streetscapes on formerly distinctive and gritty blocks.

Yet amid the monotony, there are some owners and designers doing different work. Some of it is driven by the neighborhood’s transformation from unconventional to fashionable, attracting wealthy, artistic types who want private homes that are both luxurious and high-design. Other projects exist as a cascading effect of Williamsburg’s increasing population and wealth, including new styles of public buildings and experiments in sustainability like Mr. Boyle’s, created as antidotes to profit-driven development.