A Chicago startup is betting you'll want your next home office, studio space or guest house to be made from a recycled shipping container. And its modular structures could help create more affordable housing options amid skyrocketing home prices.
S.I. Container Builds, led by wife-and-husband team Rory and Dan Rubin, sources shipping containers that were previously used to carry goods from China and repurposes them into homes and dwellings for a range of different uses. Its containers can be used to build backyard offices, fitness studios, a guest home for an aging parent or child home from college, or as a short-term rental.
Its goal is to bring a more sustainable option to home-building, with a design aesthetic that doesn't look like a typical industrial container.
"When you think of a container, people have to get away from thinking it's a rusty old box. It is absolutely spectacular," said Rory Rubin in an interview from her home office, which was made from one of the startup's containers that was designed to match the couple's 120-year-old English stucco home.
"You wouldn’t even know it's a container," she said.
S.I. Container Builds
The startup, founded in 2018, has raised $1.7 million in funding from investors including Chicago's Hyde Park Angels. S.I. Container Builds is on the verge of opening a new, 32,000-square-foot warehouse in suburban Buffalo Grove, Rory said, where it will produce its structures.
In addition to backyard spaces, the startup is selling to firms interested in creating container box communities for affordable housing and short-term rentals. It's working with a campground park in Wisconsin, supplying them with five containers in a pilot program.
On the low end, S.I. Container Builds' units run $17,000 and climb to $150,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit that involves welding two containers together. It offers fully furnished turnkey models, as well as "DIY" units that are ready for the buyer to finish themselves. The startup said it can turn a container home around about 10 weeks.
"We wanted an ease of service," Rory said. "That was really important."
The company aims to make its homes accessible to first-time buyers, as well as investors to quickly spin up a rental business. But at the end of the day, Rory said, it has to look good.
"If I didn’t want to live in it, I wouldn’t sell it," she said.
