Home Sweet Container

Dreaming of your own home in paradise? Your dream may come true. Thanks to ingenious Thai designer Chutayaves Sinthuphan of Site-Specific. Creator of small container homes that not only need hardly any land. Khun Chutayaves’ homes are small, mobile, minimalist, cheap – and best: fully functional and habitable. Just put some designer furniture in there and you even exponentiate the whole idea behind it.

A collaborator of the designer cum architect recently built the small container home R-2×20 (top right) with one bedroom, one bathroom and a living area. Big enough for a young family. And there is much more to it than meets the eyes. The two twenty-foot containers and a prefabricated bathroom on the outskirts of Bangkok are an “exercise in the making of a good, affordable housing for Thais which our government cannot seems to manage,” Khun Chutayaves writes on his website.

Will his prefab concept catch on? Or is he an utopian at the right time at the wrong place? Seems so. Because he has been studying the container housing scene closely and added significant contributions to the genre. Take his recent design around the theme of “Green Home Effects” for the Bangkok Baan Lae Suan home show. What his team came up with was a concept that circled around the 4R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle, renewable:

The Eco Living 101 model home featured many examples of earth-friendly living including the use of gray water, growing your own food and being car smart. It was constructed of four reused shipping containers and prefabricated modules, designed for a family of three with roughly 100 sq.m. living space.

The designers main aims: “Investigate who we are as human through the means of architecture and gastronomy.”

First two images show Khun Chutayaves’ R-2×20 small home project, images further below the Eco Living 101 model home.

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Comments

5 Responses to “Home Sweet Container”

anon on August 24th, 2009 1.45 pm

These aren’t cheap and they require massive amounts of air conditioning.
BangkokDan on August 24th, 2009 1.52 pm

Lots of unused old containers available in Thailand and elsewhere.

And see the space between the container’s top and the roof? For cooling air flow.

The designer adds on his site:

“This home is on the outskirts of Bangkok where temperature is always high. The house is insulated with recycled insulation material with a layer of roof above the containers to prevent the heat transmission into habitable areas.”

BangkokDan
Jaded on August 24th, 2009 5.32 pm

Well I think it’s brilliant!

The Port Authority of Thailand and the soon to be displaced inhabitants of Klong Toey could find some kind of synergy with these sorts of ideas I guess. Have there been any developments along those lines?

There are plenty of examples of people doing interesting things in other countries along these lines. I have been tinkering with the same idea (steel RSJ’s and shipping containers) as the construction materials for a beach house. Containers are perfect for salty seaside climates. However the site of the beach house is in a rather cooler north atlantic climate so I have a different take on the insulation issue.

That said, I got two good design ideas out of studying this! Cheers!
Jay on August 25th, 2009 9.44 am

Anon:

With reasonable amount of insulation, these container homes perform better than traditional construction. Also, they are designed so that the cross ventilation are at maximum, which is a lot better than most home you can buy in Thailand.

Jay
JJ FERRON on September 18th, 2009 12.23 pm

I want to build a house with recycle containers on Samui island.

Let me know if you are interested in joining this project.

Send me an email. Thanks.

JJ FERRON

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