Shipping container home could be yours for just $850,000. Wha?

The American architect Adam Kalkin was one of the early champions of shipping containers as a cheap, mobile and recyclable building resource, and his work commands high prices thanks to his profile in design magazines, online and on TV. Now one of his most ambitious projects has been put on the market with a price tag of $850,000 (€754,000).

Number 3 Linfield Lane is a 370sq m (4,000sq ft) property in Califon, New Jersey, 70km west of Manhattan, which Kalkin built in 2008. "People are definitely intrigued by the two-storey home. There are whole Instagram feeds devoted to the subject, which means the idea is no longer foreign," says Caroline Gosselin of the Gosselin Group at Prominent Properties Sotheby's International Realty.

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Adam Kalkin container home: 3 Linfield Lane, Califon, New Jersey

The architect used several containers welded together with Corten-steel beams to create two distinct wings that are connected at first floor by a metal-and-timber bridge and at ground level by a breezeway. Rather than try to hide the steel beams used to build the structure, Kalkin made a feature of them, and his use of glass sliding doors and windows opened the interior to its surroundings. "Living in this home is beyond compare in terms of flow and bringing the outside in," says its owner, Adrianne Weingarten.

Kalkin was inspired by seeing stacks of shipping containers on the docks that lined his route to New York City from his hometown of Bernardsville, New Jersey, where he built his first property. "They are like Legos, and the modules can be assembled in thousands of ways." His book Quik Build: Adam Kalkin's ABC of Container Architecture, which shows 32 of his ingenious projects, includes the Push Button House, a furnished room that unfolds hydraulically from a single container.