She picked out the high-cube containers herself, walking around the yard of Lockbox in Melbourne, avoiding any that had dings, rust or had transported chemicals. Moysey kept the industrial look of the containers, though she painted over their bright colours. Dividing walls, made out of old doors, are slideable, so that rooms can be cordoned off or made open-plan. The floor of the main room is from a bowling alley, and elsewhere there are pieces of a basketball court and remnants of the container’s original floor. The huge kitchen bench is a piece of timber from a drapery workroom and the side is smoothed from where workers once leaned against it.
Similarly she’s given a second life to the finishings. I’ve lived on boats and I love looking out on the ocean.” “I love the fact that they’ve been off and had a life. She enjoys the idea of being the next port of call for the containers, and there are nautical touches here and there – a tow rope, shells, an anchor. “There’s some feeling of emotional safety in here,” she agrees. You feel as though you could batten down the hatches and weather a storm. Her shipping-container home is the 27th house she’s built or adapted for herself, and by far the most solid. Moysey studied design at RMIT and started a building business with her husband Ross, Moysey and Daughters. Louise Moysey inside her shipping container home. “People said you’re mad, it’s going to cost a lot – you’re much better to get a prefab house. Over in Castlemaine, Victoria, Louise Moysey is adamant that in her case a new build would have been far cheaper.
But once you start stepping into nine shipping containers it starts to get pretty expensive.” ‘People said you’re mad’ Two or three containers on a bush block would be more economical and you could do so much with them. I’m sure it’s still cheaper than a new build, but not substantially. “With labour it would have been at least $450,000. “Without counting labour I’m at a touch over $300,000 on this house,” he says. The roof is a 150ml sandwich panel, which cost him $40,000. His containers were new and cost $6,000 each, but he reckons they’ve gone up substantially since then.
A lot of people clad the outside, but if you’re going to do that you should have just built a house.” He didn’t paint the outside because he likes the look of containers: “The shipping numbers are still on them. Similarly, even though shipping containers are designed to be stacked, once you cut holes for windows and doors you need extra struts if you want a second floor. “Wherever you cut a window out you have to build a steel frame for it, because once you cut the walls they fall apart like paper bags,” he says. Mick Wright’s five-bedroom shipping container home outside of Geelong while it was being built.
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