Farther west, in Callicoon Center, another of Mr. Steele’s houses ： a 1, 760-square-foot home with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, built out of four containers lined up in a row.
The house, which resembles a wood-framed barn, isn't any louder than a conventional home, said Terry Maxedon, 60, who shares it with his wife, Amy Fisch, 63.? In fact, there is only one thing about it that reminds them they are living in a shipping container: Instead of hanging pictures on the wall with nails, they use magnets. “I think that’a nice feature,” Mr. Steele said.
Of course, not all container homes are so elaborate.
When Pamela Reed, 33, and Matthew Rader, 34, virtual reality directors in Brooklyn, decided they needed to escape the city, they were content with the plain, unmodified container they put on seven acres they bought in Hobart, N.Y. “We always kind of liked the aesthetic － the raw, modern boxiness of it,” Mr. Rader said.
“We've seen online other people converting them into ultramodern, sleek-looking things, and giving them new life,” he added, while theirs is more of a “glorified tent.” （ Ms. Reed chronicled the build on her blog, Brooklyn Farm Girl. ） Still, the cost of buying the container and having it installed on their property was only about $3,000.
“We want to raise our kid in the city,” said Mr. Rader, who has a newborn daughter. “And the plan is to have it as a gateway place, a good small farm.” Already, they are producing large quantities of tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, carrots and pumpkins, he said, and as far as the container goes, “We’re not finished by any means.”
Back in Brooklyn, mobility is sometimes the biggest appeal.
Vedat Ulgen, the 28-year-old founder of Thislexik, a design studio in Red Hook currently housed in a structure made out of five containers, is in the process of moving his company into a more permanent space and taking the shipping containers upstate, to a site near Woodstock.
“That is the reason we preferred a modular design,” he said. “So we can easily take it apart and relocate it to another location, with the possibility of expansion. The containers will be a retreat for myself, and I'll rent it out on Airbnb.”
In Carolina Beach, N.C., Jennifer Godbold, 46, and Abbie-Stuart Sinclair, 50, operate the Conchs, two shipping containers marketed as beach rental properties.
“We just saw a possibility for a unique beach rental,” Ms. Sinclair said. “We’re also from a port city, so there were containers everywhere. It wasn't some obscure idea.”
Even so, their rentals were so controversial when they were being built, Ms. Godbold said, that a nearby community made it illegal to build container homes there. “The local newspaper would run a picture oe them looking as horrible as possible,” she said. “For six weeks straight.”
She and Ms. Sinclair worked with Jeremy Hardison, a senior planner with the town of Carolina Beach, to bring their idea to life. Mr. Hardison said he saw it as an exciting opportunity for something new in a place that favors unique design.
And despite the initial resistance, he believes the area will see more container homes in the future. “We’re open to the idea,”
he said. “We like the idea of alternate and sustainable construction methods.”
Finally, there's the instant-gratification factor.
Container homes are fabricated elsewhere, noted Giuseppe Ligano, a partner of the construction and design firm LOT-EK, which means that “by the time you’re done with the foundation, you can erect the whole structure － boom! － in a couple of days.”
Mr. Ligano and his partner, Ada Tolla, have been working with shipping containers since the early 1990s, in the United States, Britain, Chile, Australia, South Korea and South Africa, among other countries. Many of the designers, he said, have been “very high-end, in the direction of a contemporary, conceptual, gritty style.”
One project in the work is the Water Hub, in Staten Island, a structure commissioned by the Rebuild By Design organization （ in partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association, the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, the Van Alen Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation ） to encourage the protection of marine life along the shoreline.
The 5,000-square-foot building, slated for completion next year, will include a kayak-launching site and classroom space for the New York Harbor School. Equally notable, however, is that it will be built to withstand the effects of future storms like Hurricane Sandy.
And if there's anything that can do that, it's a shipping container.
