No Place Like Home

It's not the type of listing that would attract most prospective homebuyers: decaying, bombed-out meatpacking plant, completely windowless, recently home to vagrants who accidentally set a large section of the building ablaze. Located in an economically depressed neighborhood. Fixer-upper.

But to Howard Steinberg, co-owner of Onion Flats developers in Philadelphia, it was perfect.

"It was a big walk-in cooler, essentially, with racks for meat that ran back and forth throughout the building," he said. "It was pitch-black when you walked in, covered in Styrofoam insulation a foot thick and glued to the inside of the brick. After the fire, it was charred death. Really, really nasty."

However, the 80-year-old Capital Meats building, shuttered since 1989, gave Steinberg and his team the opportunity to transform an industrial facility of "death and darkness into a place of light and life," he said.

After years of design and construction, Capital Flats, an eight-unit residential building, opened its doors to the public. Onion Flats invited 100 people to the open house, and more than 1,000 showed up. The massive turnout illustrated the growing demand for unique living spaces in unusual buildings, even if they were once home to thousands of tons of raw meat, says Steinberg.

Keeping History Intact

In 2007, Ramiro Diaz bought a house in the eclectic, up-and-coming New Orleans neighborhood of Faubourg Marigny. In the early 1900s, the building had operated as a corner store, and then it was turned into an auto repair shop. In its most recent incarnation, it had served as a church.

When Diaz began renovating the structure into a residential building, he focused on maintaining its historical elements and keeping the space as open as possible.

The interior walls of the former church were made of beadboard, a grooved paneling popular in the 1800s that created a striped effect. It was covered in layers of paint and finish. Instead of going the easy route and replacing them, Diaz painstakingly cleaned the boards with a mixture of crushed pecan and walnut shells.

"I detest facsimiles of historic architecture, usually because they are executed poorly," Diaz said. "In the renovation of this property, I exposed, preserved and celebrated the historic architectural features."

This is a universal tenet when it comes to converting unusual structures into homes, says Steinberg. It doesn't make sense to purchase an old fire station to live in, for example, then remove the fire pole, lower the ceiling and hang drywall everywhere, making it look like a faceless loft.

Steinberg followed the same concept that Diaz used for his New Orleans project. With the Capital Flats development, Steinberg's team turned the meat racks into sliding wardrobes and built bathrooms on each floor in the elevator shaft, preserving the exposed rails that had held the car.

"The artifacts are hints of what used to be," Steinberg said. "You still get the sense that it was a factory; it's extremely industrial. We treated the redevelopment, the design of the project, as an opportunity for experimentation."

The Lighthouse Myth

When people think of a lighthouse, the first image they conjure up is a tower with a spiral staircase leading to the watchtower at the top.

So when they hear that someone converted a lighthouse into a home, naturally they believe the family is living in the tall, cylindrical structure. But that's not the case, says Jeff Gales, executive director of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, based in Hansville, Washington.

Lighthouses are typically part of a series of buildings called a lighthouse station that includes a dwelling, separate from the tower, where the keeper lived. It's this dwelling that people convert into a home as opposed to the actual lighthouse with the revolving light on top.

"I don't know of any instance in the United States where someone totally ripped out the inside of a tower with a spiral staircase and converted it into a dwelling," Gales said.

There is another roadblock: In the U.S., purchasing lighthouses to turn into private dwellings is discouraged.

In 2000, the federal government passed the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act, giving community groups and nonprofit organizations priority in purchasing decommissioned lighthouses. The goal is to ensure that historic lighthouses remain open to the public as museums.

"If a local group or some other organization can't take it over, the next best solution is to sell it to someone with the means to restore it, even if it means the lighthouse will be closed to the public," Gales said.

Old Structures Make Great New Homes

Living in a meatpacking factory might sound strange, but not as unusual as making a home inside a shipping container.

Roi Maufas, founder of Gorilla Design, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, got the idea after watching aerial footage of the wreckage in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

"We were awestruck. It was just total destruction," Maufas said. "We couldn't make anything out that looked like a neighborhood. And then we saw four or five of these shipping containers that seemed to survive the storm and flood relatively unscathed."

The one thing people want in a home is security, and there is nothing more secure than living in a structure that can withstand winds in excess of 180 mph, says Maufas.

But who would want to live in what is essentially a rectangular metal box?

As it turned out, Maufas says, the end product looks nothing like the shipping container it once was, and it's completely wind and solar powered.

These containers range in size from 160 to 320 square feet. Multiple units can be connected to create a single home outfitted with amenities such as waterfalls, solariums, hardwood floors, decks and fireplaces.

Maufas does not have a background in architecture or design. But he spent 11 years working in the film industry, and that is all the experience he says he needs.

"I think that architecture and cinematography are largely the same science. They're both studies of people moving through space and light. I've lit enough rooms in enough scenes so I have a sense of what a space needs to feel like to be well-balanced."

Still, the idea of living in a shipping container is not always an easy sell.

"Initially, people thought we were completely wacko, and I can assure you my wife probably still thinks I am," Maufas said.

Redevelopment Adds Character -- and Characters

Converting old factories, churches and unused structures into homes is a highly sustainable form of development, says Steinberg . It takes far more energy and material to tear down and rebuild an existing structure than it does to re-imagine and reuse it. Plus, converting old buildings creates greater character in communities where one house is often indistinguishable from the next, he says.

But industrial stock in cities is getting harder to find, forcing prospective developers to look in areas farther from downtown and in less desirable neighborhoods.

The upside is that properties in these sometimes troubled areas are relatively inexpensive, and that typically attracts artists.

"They're the most creative group, so you get these exciting projects happening on the periphery. It's a unique opportunity," Steinberg said.

Often the people who choose to live in these converted buildings are as unique as the structures.

After Diaz converted his church into a spacious artist studio in the front with a residence in the back, he rented it to an "interesting" group of people whom he described as a "love cult."

"The church pews were still in there, and I think they probably used them for whatever they were doing -- their rituals, I guess," Diaz said, laughing. "There were pentagrams on the walls. I didn't ask too many questions as long as they paid the rent. But they were cool and artsy. They were really into Renaissance fairs."