A house in St. Charles built of reused shipping containers surprised even its real estate agent by selling quickly.

“I was a little nervous, to be honest,” said Annie Van Broeck, the Re/Max All Pro St. Charles agent who represented the three-bedroom house made from seven shipping containers.

With wood and metal floors, traditional windows in every room, and stylish kitchen and bath finishes, the house “looks nice and it’s contemporary,” Van Broeck said, “but we didn’t know how the public would go for living in containers.” About 45 miles west of the Loop, it was the first all-container house in the Chicago area to go on the resale market.

At least 100 people toured the house within a few days of it hitting the market at $749,900, Van Broeck said. It was on the market 20 days before going under contract to buyers April 19. The sale closed June 2, at $743,000.

The design of the house “does a very good job of making it feel like you aren’t living in shipping containers,” said Rob Homa, the Baird & Warner agent who represented the buyers. They are not yet identified in public records.

"When I walk in, I can’t tell" it's made of shipping containers, Homa said.

That’s not to say the design hides the containers. Many of the rooms have corrugated walls and ceilings, telltale signs of shipping containers, the coat hooks in a hallway are salvaged hardware from the containers, and the metal-seamed wood flooring is straight from the containers.

“If you didn’t know the floors were from the containers, you’d think they were just very awesome floors,” Van Broech said.

Children’s art was attached to the metal walls with magnets, Van Broeck said.

The sellers, Stephanie and Clark Evans, whose homebuilding firm is called group3, completed the house for their use in 2018. They did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2021, a house built partially of shipping containers was the first in the Chicago area to go on the market, and sold fast. The key difference is that the St. Charles house is built entirely of containers and thus presented more of a test to the resale market.

Building with shipping containers is faster and costs less than the traditional stick-building method. The Evanses avoided a common problem of using old shipping containers—contamination—by sourcing only containers that had been used to ship dry electronics.

In Chicago, shipping containers have been most often used to build micro-retail stores for startups, including a bike shop, as well as a Starbucks in Edgewater and a developer's retail and entertainment installation in the West Loop.

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