Graceville Container Home

Elements

31 Container(s)

Size

6000 Foot²

Age

Built In 2013

Levels

3 Floor(s)
Address: 8 Jaora Street, Graceville, Queensland, Australia
Project Type(s): Single Family Residential
Bedrooms: 4
Bathrooms: 4.5

Note: Map location may not be exact. Click to open in Google Maps.

Graceville Container Home

Description

Let’s just be direct: the Graceville Container Home is one of the finest large container homes ever built anywhere in the world. It’s truly a work of art, impressive in its aesthetics, creative use of materials, and energy efficiency.

It’s a home that rightfully earned the attention it has received and is worth studying, whether you intend to build a container mansion of your own or just reuse some of the ideas in a small container home.

Background Story

In 2011, Todd and Diana Miller purchased a house in Graceville, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia known for its high quality of life. It’s only about 8km from the CDB of Brisbane and accessible by rail but feels like a tranquil paradise. Beautiful parklands and river walks abound, while still having access to restaurants, shops, and other suburban amenities within walking distance.

With such a pristine location, the plan was to renovate an older house into one appropriate for the area. Todd was a builder, and he, Diana, and their two young girls had done the ‘move and renovate’ shuffle several times before.

However, not long after taking possession, the house experienced significant damage caused by the 2011 Queensland floods. Making matters worse, their insurance didn’t come close to covering the total cost of the damage.

They repaired their home as best they could during the following months but still dreamed of doing a full-scale renovation of the house. That is when Todd came up with the idea of building a new house out of shipping containers instead of traditional building materials. He was attracted to containers because of the speed with which they can built, their incredible strength, and the sustainable designs they inspire.

He also knew that containers would allow him to afford to build the home that they really wanted. Their dream was a house with plenty of room for their children, open space for entertaining, and an art studio where Diana could work.

Planning and Design

With this seed planted in their brains, Todd and Diana started thinking about their design. Using cardboard from cereal boxes, they tweaked and refined a design until they settled on their dream container home.

The design made use of 31 20-foot shipping containers assembled into a four-bedroom, 6000 square foot, three-story building. The interiors of the containers themselves can account for 4960 square feet, with the balance coming from enclosed spaces in between containers as you can see in many of the pictures.

Based on their experience with the flooding in 2011, they knew they wanted this house to be flood-proof and resistant to other types of inclement weather as well. The design includes an expansive ground floor made from ten containers arranged in parallel banks of five containers set side-by-side and separated by a small gap. The ground floor containers essentially replace the stilts that are traditionally used by Queenslander homes to get the main living areas up off the ground.

The ground floor is the location of the garage, home office, art studio, workshop, gym, full bathroom, and rumpus room (or what people in the United States might call a recreation room or playroom). None of these ground floor spaces are insulated or used for habitation, which means they’ll be fine even if completely covered by floodwaters.

The second floor was designed with eleven containers and is where you’ll find the open-plan kitchen and living room (with a two-story open space above), plus three bedrooms, a bathroom, the laundry room with half bath, and a study. It repeats a similar five plus five container configuration, albeit shifted slightly in order to overhang on the side of the home with the pool. The 11th container is hidden behind wood cladding and holds an indoor/outdoor dining area just off of the living area (and labeled as a deck on the floorplan).

As you can see in the floorplan, two of the bedrooms on this floor connect on either side of the study, and the study has a staircase leading up to a bathroom above. The full bathroom on the second floor is in the ensuite bathroom for the third bathroom. Therefore, the only public bathroom on this floor is the half bath in the laundry room.

Finally, ten shipping containers were used to build the third floor of the home, once again in the same five plus five arrangement. Up here is a small reading room that serves as a stairway landing into the large master suite with an ensuite bathroom. There’s also that additional bathroom that is accessed from the study down below. Both the master bedroom and the reading room have access to the huge third-floor deck as well.

The design also included a swimming pool, tropical landscaping, and distinctive touches throughout. For instance, there are several indoor and outdoor graffiti pieces painted onto the container corrugated skins. And the incredible tiled mural in the master bathroom is worth highlighting, even though it’s sadly not where most people will ever see it. So many of the accents and furnishings in the home are unique that it would take an entire article just to highlight them all.

Construction

To improve their build time and reduce any anxiety about reduced strength due to corrosion and wear/tear, Todd and Diana elected to build their container home with boxes that were essentially new. They were purchased for about $2900 USD each but were delivered in three stages to complement the phases of the build.

They started by fully demolishing their old home and clearing the site, then laying foundations for their new container house. This part of the construction took about a month.

For the foundation, they drilled and placed concrete piers roughly nine meters into the soil below. This deep embedment will also help provide protection from uplift forces that could result from flooding or a cyclone. 

Soon after, Todd took the first delivery of ten containers used for the ground floor. Each container was lifted into place and laid down on top of the concrete piers. Within a few hours, the ground floor was assembled and welded together.

A similar process was repeated for the second and third floors a few weeks later. Breaking the assembly into multiple stages meant less land was required to store the containers. Given that this container home was built in a mature neighborhood with comparatively small lots, this was a necessary method to get everything on site.

With all 31 containers fully assembled and welded to each other, the cutting and modifying of the containers could begin. Todd used cut-off wheels in his angle grinder to remove corrugated container walls, then numerous I-beams were added to support the openings and open spaces between containers.

On the exterior, Todd added a special thermal reflective coating called InfraCOOL from Dulux to reduce the heat gain from the sun. Interestingly, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ordered Dulux to pay a $400,000 AUD fine for misleading representations about the temperature-reducing characteristics of its coating. It’s something we’ve discussed at length in our article on Cool Roof Coatings, which is worth checking out.

However, coatings for the container walls weren’t the only method of climate control Todd and Diana employed. For thermal insulation, they used rock wool batts in the walls and 4-inch thick polystyrene sheets above the roof. And the numerous windows in the house were built with low-E glass, which reduces emissivity to lower the heat gain.

Another interesting fact related to climate control is that this monstrous house was actually designed without air conditioning. Numerous louvers, doors, and windows can be adjusted to get a cross-breeze through the home that keeps things quite livable.

This eco-friendly attitude towards design extended into other areas as well. For instance, the home has a 3000-liter tank to collect rainwater from the roof and greywater from sinks and drains to be reused. And many secondary building materials were recycled, such as wood and glass used for railings, trim work, etc.

On the interior, wooden framing holds the wall insulation and plasterboard interior finishes. However, the container ceilings are left exposed in most parts of the house to highlight the cargo box origins of the house’s building materials.

The flooring is a durable bamboo laid over the existing shipping container plywood. It provides some warmth to what might otherwise be a stark feeling from the steel ceilings and largely white walls. However, the aesthetic of the flooring was expanded to some of the walls as well, where perforated Tasmanian oak sheets were used. These provide not only a softer appearance but have some acoustical properties as well that help reduce echos from the other solid surfaces in the home.

By July 2013, the home was finished and ready for move-in. Owing to the location, they faced several severe weather events that damaged building materials, hampered access to the site, delayed the overall project well past its four-month goal.

But given everything they dealt with weather-wise plus the general challenges of building an unconventional home, we think the six-month completion time is still pretty remarkable. Their total cost was about $400,000 AUD, which was slightly over budget thanks to some design additions like the swimming pool and additional landscaping.

What Happened Next

The Graceville Container Home was met by tons of media interest during its construction, and certainly after its completion. It was featured by numerous media outlets from near and far, most famously on the Grand Designs television program in October 2014. Additionally, the home won Australian Housing Industry Association Awards for Innovative Building and Interior Design. 

Not long after moving in, Todd and Diana realized the home was a bit bigger than their family needed. And unlocking some of the sweat equity they’d built up during the construction sounded pretty appealing. So, they listed their home for sale. 

By June 2014, the home had sold for $1.42M AUD, a huge profit for the family! Since then, the home has been sold again to new owners. In August of 2021, the home sold for $2.18M AUD.

Conclusion

There’s much to love about the Graceville Container House, and as the sale prices above indicate, the general public and real estate market certainly agree. It brings together so many different things in a thoughtful way.

Vast indoor spaces coupled with public and private outdoor areas that have amazing views of the tropical foliage and nearby river. Strong, industrial design merged with the warmth and comfort of wood and bespoke art. 

It’s one of the most beautiful and important container homes ever built because it expanded the minds of so many to demonstrate what is possible for container construction. It’s likely that you’ll take issue with some of the design decisions, but hopefully, you can appreciate the bigger picture and overall inspiration of this special container home.

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