Inhabitat

How many of you have wished you could trade your apartment & crappy office space for a floating live/work houseboat in the San Francisco Bay? I know I have. I came across an article in last week’s New York Times which refueled my hope that one day those houseboat dreams could actually come true. The inspiring article I read profiled Olle Lundberg, a modernist architect who works with salvaged industrial materials. Lundberg has a couple of amazing houses in the San Francisco bay area and basically lives the life that I would like to be leading someday as a successful eco-architect, commuting between two stunning residences built from entirely by hand, from salvaged material.

Lundberg’s weekday San Francisco residence was built from an old car ferry that he found in Iceland, shipped through the Panama Canal, and docked at a pier in the Mission Bay neighborhood. Lundberg’s design firm had been looking for a vacant industrial building in San Francisco that they could renovate ? but despite the dotcom crash could find nothing suitable. “I’d seen tugboats that had been converted,” Mr. Lundberg said, “so I thought, ‘What about a small ship?’ ” A search on Shiprepro.com lead him to the Maritol, which was built in 1975, and was listed for $260,000. Much renovation and a few years later, Lundberg and his wife are happily living and working in their new floating residence. The ship has two floors: the open-space bedroom is above and the dining room (complete with a salvaged wood dining table) sits below the water level. The dining table was fashioned out of an 18-foot-long slab of cypress left over from the Slanted Door, a popular Vietnamese restaurant Mr. Lundberg designed in the newly restored Ferry Building. It was originally purchased for the restaurant from the Urban Tree Mill, a nonprofit group based in Oakland, Calif., that recycles trees removed during street improvements.

Lundberg travels 2 hours north every weekend to relax in his Cazedero residence, which was built entirely from materials salvaged from houses and offices that Mr. Lundberg’s firm, Lundberg Design, built or remodeled. Apparently Lundberg was able to convince his staff to pitch in free labor to help build his house by throwing beer-fueled “building parties”. The pool, shown below, was made from an old wooden water tank – 25 feet in diameter and 14 feet deep – from a cattle ranch one of his clients bought. Looks like that may not meet standard pool safety codes ? but it sure is better looking than your average generic swimming pool.

Photographs by Peter DaSilva @The New York Times

The New York Times article, entitled The Scavenger’s Guide to the Galaxy has an excellent list of resources for finding quality salvage materials.