I saw this years ago and still can’t get it out of my head. Olle Lundberg, a renowned modernist architect, prefers to make his own personal living spaces out of castoffs and debris. During the work week he lives with his wife in San Francisco in an abandoned car ferry from Iceland. He found the Maritol, which was built in 1975 and was listed at $260,000, on Shiprepro.com. He’d been looking for something smaller, but he fell in love with the car ferry when he saw it online, shipped it home through the Panama Canal and permanently docked it at a pier in the Mission Bay neighbourhood. The boat has an open-space bedroom above and a dining room (complete with a salvaged wood dining table) below 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 in SF.
Lundberg also built a weekend cabin for himself and his wife just north of San Francisco, entirely from architectural debris and castoffs:
From Inhabitat and the New York Times.