The Savannah Project, an artist’s container home and studio | Julio Garcia

Artist and designer Julio Garcia is known for his mixed media prints. When creating his own home and studio, he worked on a larger scale but still succeeded in joining disparate elements into a unified whole, working with industrial shipping containers, natural materials and the lush foliage of his lot in Savannah, Georgia. As a port city, Savannah has an abundance of shipping containers made obsolete by the largely one-way flow of consumer goods from China to America. Garcia repurposed two such containers to create the small budget-conscious home seen here.

The two 40′ shipping containers were placed about 6′ apart on a foundation system of steel I-beams resting on concrete piers. The 6′ gap was filled with a wood-framed floor and shed roof, and the container sidewalls were then cut away to create a large open living area. Two I-beams spanning the room hold up the roof, replacing the structural support that was lost with the walls. Garcia left the exteriors of the two containers in their original battered state as a reminder of their industrial past. Natural wood delineates the gap between the containers as well as the new window openings cut into them.

Contrasting with the exterior, Garcia gave the inside a clean contemporary look. The kitchen is subtly set off from the rest of the open living area by the use of wood flooring instead of what appears to be black-tinted concrete. The black floor and countertops set off the white walls used to display artwork. There is only one bedroom, at the end of one of the containers. Looking at the photos, it seems like it would be fairly easy to create a second bedroom by closing off the opposite end of the other container. Garcia left the original container loading doors functional, and they can be opened to the decks at either end of the small house.

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Photographs by Tessa Blumenberg, courtesy of Price Street Projects. Via Busyboo.

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