The Porter Container Home Is Here to Prove That There Is Beauty in Simplicity

Alternative living and housing have seen a recent boom in popularity due to a perfect storm of (both negative and positive) factors, including the international health crisis, the looming financial crisis, and the lifestyle changes they both imposed. Upcycling shipping containers into homes is now seen as a financially convenient alternative to living in a brick-and-mortar house, as long as you overlook the downsides involved, like the compact floorplan, the linear layout, and the not-exactly-appealing aesthetics that come with living inside a metal box.

The Porter has none of those but, then again, The Porter is not your average container home. It’s the crème de la crème of container homes in a way, a premium offer for a very niche segment of the market. For this reason, it’s not just a solid example of upcycling, but also proof that there is a lot of beauty in simplicity.

The Porter is the premium model from Bob’s Containers, an Austin, Texas-based company that makes container homes, either as production-series or custom units. The Porter, which is currently offered for rent on Airbnb, is actually a custom example, but can be further customized if money is not an issue. That’s the biggest takeaway here: it’s a beautiful container home, but it’s also a premium product so it’s priced like one.

The container is 40 feet (12 meters) long with a width of 8 feet (2.4 meters), so the resulting home offers 320 square feet (29.8 square meters) of living space. It’s tiny, granted, but it’s made to feel a bit more spacious through the use of light finishes, low-profile furniture, and a large wooden garage door with sections of glass. This helps to open up the living room completely to the outdoor, offer the best ventilation and natural light and, just as importantly, prevent guest from feeling like they’re inside a box.

The layout of The Porter is typical of a tiny home, regardless of whether it’s in a container or on a trailer: you get a living room and an open-plan kitchen in the middle, with the bedroom on one side and the bathroom at the opposite end. Despite the standard layout, The Porter is still able to stand out because of its desert Boho interior design, with neutrals, natural materials and scarce furnishes.

Make no mistake about it, The Porter is small, but it’s pretty and suitable even for longer-term living – as long as you’re not into cooking too much, because the kitchen is very basic. By comparison, the bedroom and the bathroom feel spacious: there’s even a dresser in the former, and a sizable walk-in shower clad in Spanish tiles in the latter.

But the cherry on top with this home is… up top: The Porter comes with a rooftop deck, on which you’ll find a dining table for two (there is one in the kitchen as well), a pair of comfortable chairs for watching the sunset, and a bathtub. The bathtub is actually a cowboy’s tub, but it has both hot and cold water, so it’s perfect for any weather (*almost). Also here is a grill and, off to the side, a hammock that can double as a sun lounger.

As a rental unit, The Porter seems like the perfect place to spent the weekend away from the noise in the city. The fact that it’s located on a property called Desert Rose Ranch, on the Texas Wine Trail, helps with the getting away part. But it also has potential as a permanent residence, especially for adopters of the downsizing trend: it offers the comforts of a home in a much smaller footprint, and it’s quite elegant, too.

The only aspect where there is no downsizing with The Porter is in pricing: the unit shown in the gallery and in the video at the bottom of the page starts at $149,000. This is tiny-house-money, and you’d get more mobility with one, as well. But with a tiny house that you tow around you don’t get a patio deck with a tub, and Moroccan and Spanish tiles, so there’s that.