Unfortunately a container house will always end up both more expensive and worse than a traditionally built house. Containers are fantastic as containers but terrible for making a house with. As soon as you start cutting holes in them they lose a great deal of their structural strength which is their main advantage. Terrible to insulate and for condensation as well. The exception is if you’re happy with a single container with no additional holes and only the doors for access and windows and you live in a very low humidity environment.

>> Unfortunately a container house will always end up both more expensive and worse than a traditionally built house.

I remember when this became popular and also remember plenty of articles deriding the fact by architects and engineers both agreeing this was an incredibly poor idea for a number of reasons.

You'd be a thousand times better off just hiring an architect and doing a prefab or modular home.

Could you elaborate on the high prices?

I have a friend who plans on building a container house, and who is convinced that it will be much cheaper than a traditional house. Note that we live in Europe, where homes are build from stone and concrete, not wood and cardboard.

You can build a container house that’s cheap but it won’t be nice. You can build a container house that is nice but it won’t be cheap. I spent a very long time looking into this as I really wanted to have a container house. Unfortunately the more research I did the more I realised what a bad idea it was. A container is great because you have a basic structure and it’s watertight from day one. However, getting to that point with a regular build is actually pretty straightforward. Everything past that point though is a massive pain in the ass when you’re drilling or cutting into corten steel. Adding insulation, windows, electrical fittings, everything else ends up being a pain and/or 3 times more expensive and/or 3 times more time consuming. It gets to the point where you basically just building a regular house inside the container anyway and you realize that you just don’t need the container in the first place. As I said before there are really specific instances where it makes sense but if you look at all the container houses that look really nice, the build cost is always insanely expensive. Often two or three times the cost of an equivalent regular house.

You can build a wooden house in Europe as well, it's just not cheap, e.g. https://scotframe.co.uk/ : not only is the timber more expensive than the US, the main challenge is getting land and planning permission.

I've no idea what permissions you'd need for a container house.

It depends, actually. Container prices are very volatile. If you're in the middle of a crash, a container house can be cheap. GP was correct however in pointing out they aren't particularly good for building houses that are actually nice to live in.

EDIT: There's a caveat here. Because containers are trivially transportable, you have lots of options when it comes to assembling off-site that could be kind of nice. For instance, if you were a carpenter with a nice workshop, and wanted to fit out your house in your shop instead of in a muddy building site, it's kind of cool that you can do all the fitting, then put the parts on a truck. This would also be cheaper. If I was self-building, this would be a big consideration for me, because it's not actually very nice working in a building site, and it's not particularly efficient either.

You can buy a manufactured home if you want the factory. They are cheaper, but mostly because they don't allow any customization.

Grand Designs has an episode featuring a container house build. I recommend showing it your friend, as there might be a few things to learn.

As I recall, the biggest challenge was cutting out the sides while maintaining structural integrity. They ended up having to do a lot of complicated stuff to make it structurally sound, nearly negating the benefits of using containers in the first place.

But it looks great. I think the episode is on Netflix. Here [1] is an article with photos and a ten-minute clip from the episode.

[1] https://metalbuildinghomes.org/grand-designs-shipping-contai...

Works if you like narrow rooms smelling like an old fridge.