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Artist builds his Savannah studio with shipping containers

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A decade of sketches finally found its lot, and Julio Garcia built his container studio without cutting down a single tree.

Julio Garcia, an artist, architect, and designer working under his own firm, Price Street Projects, had spent nearly ten years drawing up plans for shipping container homes before he found the right site: a long, narrow wooded lot behind his own house in Savannah, Georgia. In a video feature by Kirsten Dirksen, Garcia walks through the build he calls “The Savannah Project,” a live-work retreat and studio pieced together from two retired 40-foot steel containers hauled off the docks at the Port of Savannah.

• Garcia sourced two 40-foot steel shipping containers from the Port of Savannah and managed a two-week crane delivery and placement process that preserved every tree on the wooded lot.
• The finished structure runs roughly 800 to 970 square feet, sitting on steel I-beams over concrete pier foundations, with the two containers offset by six feet and bridged by a wood-framed addition with an angled shed roof and clerestory windows.
• Garcia estimates a comparable container shell can be built for around $50,000, aided by salvaged materials including 100 rescued sheets of drywall, a discarded refrigerator, and black slate lab countertops pulled from a demolished college science building.

Reading the Site Before Drawing the Plan

Garcia’s central design philosophy is that the land dictates the structure, not the other way around. Looking out at the narrow, tree-lined stretch of his Savannah property, he says the shape of the lot practically told him what to build. That instinct shaped everything that followed, from the linear footprint of the two containers to the decision to leave the surrounding forest untouched during construction.

Getting two 40-foot steel boxes onto a wooded lot without felling a tree took meticulous planning rather than luck. According to the project’s coverage, crane delivery and positioning stretched over roughly two weeks, with every lift and swing plotted in advance so the containers slid into place around the existing canopy instead of through it.

Killing the Cargo-Box Feeling

The biggest design problem with a container home isn’t structural — it’s psychological. Garcia has seen enough shipping-container projects to know that many of them still feel like what they are: metal boxes.

“There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re inside a container so in the design we had to address that. I’ve been in a couple of projects and they don’t function very well and you’re like, ‘Oh, I still feel like I’m in a metal box.'”

His fix was structural. Garcia cut away the interior container walls and replaced the load-bearing function with steel I-beams, opening up sightlines that a stock container simply doesn’t allow. Readers curious about the mechanics of pulling structural walls out of a build without the roof coming down might find the process familiar from a piece like How To: Removing a Load Bearing Wall! (EASY STEP-BY-STEP), where the same load-transfer logic applies on a conventional frame house.

Blue Steel Outside, White Gallery Inside

Garcia kept the containers’ weathered industrial-blue patina on the exterior, a deliberate nod to their working past hauling freight through the Port of Savannah. Inside, the palette flips entirely to an airy, white gallery-style finish that reads more like an art studio than a cargo hold — fitting, given Garcia’s own background as an artist.

Roughly 600 square feet of wrap-around decking extends the living space outward, reached through floor-to-ceiling glass openings and the containers’ original cargo doors, repurposed rather than replaced. The layout inside is straightforward: an open living area, an open kitchen, a full bathroom, and a bedroom/office suite, all built to feel far larger than the raw container dimensions would suggest.

Building It for $50,000

Garcia’s affordability pitch rests on scavenging as much as buying. The 100 sheets of rescued drywall, the salvaged refrigerator, and the black slate countertops pulled from a demolished college science lab all did double duty — cutting cost while giving the interior finishes a history most new-build homes don’t have. It’s the same salvage-and-repurpose math that’s driven interest in other container conversions, including the build compared and priced out in TIMELAPSE 5min. Metal House | Costs, Pros-Cons, The Container House Killer?.

Through Price Street Projects, Garcia has since developed what he describes as near do-it-yourself plans for container builds, along with commercial container installations. But he’s consistent on one point: the site should always determine the design, not a template stamped onto whatever lot happens to be available.