Tour Kevin Copeland's CARGO By KVN Shipping Container Home in Atlanta

It was a simple idea: Build a house using empty shipping containers, those house-size metal boxes used to move cargo and goods across the country and across oceans. Atlanta builder Kevin Copeland had ample time to study them. With sturdy metal walls, 8-foot ceilings and more than 300 square feet of empty space, he could imagine that a container would be big enough to live in. Outfitted with windows and doors, he realized that big metal box, 40 feet long x 8 feet long wide, could be the start of something bigger, a move toward affordable housing that is currently not available to a large segment of the population.

To that end, Kevin founded CARGO by KVN, a development company focused on repurposing used shipping containers. His most recent project is a three-story home in Atlanta’s Pittsburgh community, using shipping containers to form the bottom floor.

The new house in Atlanta has a living room/kitchen/dining area, three bedrooms, a flex room that can be used as another bedroom, an office or "anything you want," two and a half bathrooms and three decks with views of downtown Atlanta.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. It all began in Portsmouth, Virginia, where Kevin grew up and graduated from high school.

Portsmouth is an industrial city across the Chesapeake Bay from Norfolk, where there was a Ford manufacturing plant, now closed, and the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. “It was a regular childhood,” says Kevin. “Outside all day, come in when the street lights come on. I had a great upbringing, very supportive family.” In hindsight, it wasn’t the easiest, he says. “It made me understand that it actually made me tougher. Pretty much built me for what I’m doing right now.”

But opportunities in Portsmouth were limited, he says. “Working at the Ford plant, going into the army, or if your family could afford it, going on to college. The only opportunity I saw for myself was to get a good job, go to work, save the money and buy a house.”

At age 22, Kevin joined the US Merchant Marines, the seafaring fleet of commercial ships and civilian mariners that transport cargo between nations. “I saw it as the most viable option to get paid a lot of money for doing hard work,” he says. As a mariner, he worked on container ships, transferring goods from around the world — “Belgium, Germany, the Middle East, China, everywhere — and bringing them back to the US.” He was at sea, working for months at a time, but he had a plan. “The first time I came off the ship, I decided to teach myself how to build a house.”

That first project, a spec house that Kevin built in Charlotte, North Carolina, took about two years to complete, he says. He would spend four to six months on the ship, return to Charlotte and work on the house “until I started to go broke,” then go back to sea. “I would come off the ship and sleep in my car. Every time my funds got down to about $5,000, I’d go back on the ship.”

There, he began to pay more attention to the shipping containers they transported. “After teaching myself how to build that first house, I started to look at containers differently, as a simple box," Kevin says. “After you cut the windows and doors, it’s pretty much a house at that point.”

The three-story house Kevin built in Atlanta is what he calls a “hybrid container house.” “I thought this house would take six containers; the city only allowed me to use two, on the first floor. The second and third floors are stick-built,” using traditional framing methods.

Step inside, and you begin to see the remarkable transformation from shipping container to modern, style-forward home. The size of a one-bedroom container home is 40 by 8 feet; the first floor of Kevin’s hybrid house, the actual container portion, contains two bedrooms. A challenge is to maximize the space in the small rooms. “Containers have a lower ceiling,” Kevin says. “Large windows and white walls make the space feel enormous in comparison to how big it actually is.”

He uses other “architectural tricks” to make the space seem larger: “Use 8-foot doors instead of the standard six-plus feet. You want to use very large windows to bring in a lot of natural light.”

Kevin uses the same sleight of hand in the adjoining double bathroom. “I kept the colors the same to maximize the space — white walls, white ceilings, light floors.” The floating vanities are fashioned from upper kitchen cabinets, 12 inches deep to maximize the walkway floor space, set against a black porcelain tile accent wall. “The floating vanities give more space,” Kevin explains. “There’s a little bit of trickery when you’re dealing with container homes.”

Kevin uses the same color scheme in the second first-floor guest room. Large windows look out into the front yard and allow maximum light in to make the room seem larger.

The living area of the hybrid house is on the second floor, “in the stick-frame portion of the house,” Kevin says. “I wanted to capture all the views of downtown, so the living, kitchen and dining areas — all open concept with two decks — actually gives you multiple views of downtown.”

The living room area, with a modern electrical fireplace set in an accent wall the color of iron ore, has its own private entrance and private deck. Kevin chose neutral colors in this space to give it a cozier feeling, he says.

The thoroughly modern kitchen is “a labor of love,” Kevin says. “I wanted a chef’s kitchen, with a 36-inch dual fuel stove." The mirrored tile backsplash in a honeycomb pattern is a striking addition. “The backsplash is a design idea that a lot of people fought me on, but I did it because I wanted the space to feel bigger, and the reflection makes it feel like it's two times the size.” The floating hood above the stove, also a design idea to add another texture layer, is suspended from a dropped ceiling in the center of the space. “Usually the range is on the wall, but I like to go against the grain.”

In the kitchen area, Kevin points to “another fun feature,” the accent wall for the stairwell, a see-through partition that allows views of the stairs on two levels. “It’s actually 1x1 pieces of lumber that they deliver when they deliver bulk objects to the job site,” he says. “This is actually trash. We took it and repurposed it and made something beautiful. This cost $100, and it was worth every penny.”

Behind the kitchen, the dining room area leads to the second deck. “This is my favorite part of the house,” Kevin says. The deck is 40 feet long by 7 feet deep. “I could come out on a nice Friday night with a glass of wine and just chill out and relax,” he says. “Not many houses have three decks and city views of downtown.”

The primary bedroom is on the third level. Spray foam insulation in the walls ensures a quiet retreat from the noise of the city and outside elements. Here, too, white walls, white ceiling, light floors and large windows contribute to the room’s spacious, open feeling.

The adjoining primary bathroom is behind a frosted glass barn door, which opens to reveal another light, bright room designed to maximize space. “I just wanted to match what we had on the first level,” so, again, upper kitchen cabinets serve as a floating vanity to carry the theme, Kevin says. This bath has ultra-modern fixtures, vanity bowls and backlit mirrors.

The flex room is down the hall and is set up to show it as a nursery. “But it can be used for multiple purposes,” Kevin says. The white walls and light floors offer a feeling of spaciousness, and the large windows look out above and into the surrounding trees.

The build was difficult, Kevin admits, because it was a learning process for everyone involved. “Everybody was new to it. It was my first container home; my framers, it was their first time working with metal. We had to get a feel for each other, so it was a learning process for the first house."

It had to begin with a solid foundation, he says. "We have an 8-inch monolithic slab, using rebar and fiber to give the strength to hold a structure this size.”

Where things started to get tricky was when it came time to deliver the two containers and move them into position in this neighborhood of closely spaced houses. The move required roads to be closed, delivery trucks to drive in reverse for about a half-mile to get to the job site, and a 100-ton crane to lift the shipping containers and put them in place on the foundation. “That day was terrifying. I was scared, hoping everything would work out. And it actually did,” Kevin says.

The two containers were set in place 4 feet apart; a stick-built portion bridges the space between them to form the 20-foot width of the home's lower floor.

“I decided to cover most of the container,” Kevin says. Most of the exterior walls are covered with panels of cement board siding. “I wanted to add a lot of detail because the front elevation is so flat, so I added window flares to give it more texture.” One-by-four trim pieces add even more texture and dimension. “People who didn’t see the early process still couldn’t believe it was a container house.”

The house has a new owner, but that’s not the end of it. “Now I’m looking to keep the ball rolling and do more affordable living spaces using repurposed shipping containers,” Kevin says. “My vision for what to do next is to build a commercial structure, a multi-family-type structure using shipping containers and actually start an affordable housing movement.”

It’s an important goal, he says, “because everybody deserves a home. There shouldn’t be anybody living under a bridge when I can make them a container home. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”