Cargo containers create an ultra-modern cabin
ZAYANTE, Calif. — Suspended from a crane in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Connie DeWitt’s kitchen and bathroom are inches from nudging a madrone tree.
The 30-foot shipping container was the largest of six trucked from Oakland, Calif., up a muddy Zayante road Thursday afternoon. Before dinner, fewer than eight hours after the containers arrived, workers from NorCal Construction in Santa Cruz, Calif., had ground the final bits of rust off the boxes and welded them together to create DeWitt’s two-story mountain retreat.
“The crane guy said it might be tough, but if we put a man on the moon, we can do it,” Dewitt said.
She was watching the spectacle unfold with some friends, who’d dropped by to check on the progress.
Homes built from used cargo containers are a growing trend, but the Zayante cabin was a first for nearly everyone involved in its construction: the DeWitts; designer David Fenster of Modulus Architects; general contractor Adam Dorn of Norcal Construction; and even Santa Cruz County, which has known an offbeat home or two in its day.
Pieced together like Lincoln Logs in a single afternoon, the construction project seemed to belie the time it took to design the cabin — and fit it within the DeWitts’ budget and space constraints.
“There have been more consultants on this project than I’ve done on certain high-rises,” Fenster said.
In May 2009, Connie and husband Kam DeWitt purchased 10.8 acres on an adjacent pair of parcels off Zayante Road.
Connie DeWitt wanted a light-filled, minimalist retreat, a world away from the family’s San Jose residence, which was built in 1912.
“I wanted a clean aesthetic, not something that would get moldy,” Connie DeWitt said. “I didn’t want to spend all our time maintaining it.”
A prefab home seemed like the obvious choice, maybe a Michelle Kaufmann or a Rocio Romero. Both designers offer a modern aesthetic, with relatively predictable pricing. But trucking a prefab home into the Santa Cruz Mountains posed challenges. Even if a truck could make it up through the steep, winding road through the redwoods, the private bridge off Zayante Road was too narrow to fit a house.
“Some (prefab homes) are flat-pack, like Ikea houses, and the constructor puts it together,” Connie DeWitt said. “But (the designs are) not that flexible. And our land is terraced, as the creek has worked its way down over the eons.” Her research eventually pointed her to shipping containers, reused by a growing number of people to build homes and commercial structures.
SG Blocks, the New York-based company Connie DeWitt used to purchase and customize the containers, bills them as “earthquake-, hurricane-, fire- and tornado-resistant.” In 2006, Sun Microsystems created a modular data center inside a shipping container and rattled it through a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.
“It’s almost like you can see the container laughing,” said David Fenster, principal architect of Modulus in San Jose, the DeWitts’ friend and designer of the Zayante house. “It’s really one of the strongest things man has ever built. They’ll stack ‘em 10 high and ship them across the ocean.”
Cabins in Zayante, many of them built in the 1970s with the wood paneling and shag carpeting to show for it, start around $200,000.
DeWitt estimates she will have paid close to $600,000 for her custom home. The DeWitts contacted a homeowner in Richmond, Va., who forewarned them that if they were hoping to save money, they should look elsewhere.
The same proved true for saving time.
“It’s been a much bigger project than any of us anticipated,” DeWitt said.
Even before the myriad of consultants — soil analysts, structural engineers and geologists, to name a few — DeWitt’s first roadblock was finding a suitably flat spot on her land. It helped that she wanted a home with a light footprint, no more than 1,200 square feet.
On a camping trip, she found a clearing, roughly 200-by-70 feet, where the trees were already felled and the sunlight streamed in.
A large redwood would have to be axed — there needed to be enough room for a fire truck to turn around — but the DeWitts milled the wood in Watsonville, Calif., to make an eventual staircase.
Fenster also camped out with the DeWitts at the site to help him get an idea how to design their shipping-container house — a first in his career.
“To take a container, and figure out efficient ways to make it work on a very small site, in a very small area, on a very small footprint — to create something that would be wonderful to be in would be very challenging,” Fenster said.
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