'The economic factors added up': After 19 house moves, this renter now calls a shipping container home

There’s nothing diminutive about the way Justine Wilson has lived her life. From world travel and living abroad to harbourside homes and the inner-city thrum of Sydney, the interior designer and property stylist has always been able to adapt and move with the prevailing winds of life.

So, is moving from a four-bedroom, three-living room house in the inner city to a tiny shipping container on the banks of the Hawkesbury River just another change to be negotiated and embraced?

“I’ve lived a pretty interesting life,” says Wilson, director of Vault Interiors, whose peripatetic ways led to a whopping 19 moves before this particular tree change.

Most people would find the prospect of upping stumps so often a daunting experience, but the designer has become an expert in rolling with the particularly hard punches of the past few years.

“It’s been a really challenging business environment with COVID first and then a series of aggressive interest rate rises,” Wilson says. “As a single person, I thought to myself, ‘Do I really need to be renting a house this big?’”

Financial stresses, city-living pressure and a desire to streamline her life were also nudging her to find a different kind of fulfilment. Wilson hadn’t really thought of the tiny home option until a serendipitous offer fell her way.

“My friends had a converted shipping container on their property on the Hawkesbury that they would rent out. It became available and I decided to just do it,” she says. “The timing was right and the economic factors added up.”

You’d have to think that this relocation, out of all of the many moves that had come before, would be the hardest, especially when you discover Wilson describes herself as a “maximalist”. However, in the same spirit of reinvention and renewal, she welcomed the opportunity to “edit” her belongings and find out what it was she really treasured.

“Look, I’ll never not be me,” she laughs. “I love trinkets. I love all my things, but this decision gave me the opportunity to stop and take time to find out what it was I wanted.”

The genius of a tiny house move is that you simply can’t take everything with you. 

“One of the things I say to people is you really have to be willing to downsize everything,” she says. “Trying to bring a four-bedroom house to a tiny house would be a mental and emotional nightmare.”

How exactly then, after a lifelong love affair with collecting those little things that make your heart sing, even after a process of culling and compression, do you fit anything more than a bed, a table and a couch into a 12-metre by 2.3-metre rectangle?

“You use every single available inch,” the designer says. “You need to be clever, find compact versions of things you need, buy items that serve dual or multiple functions. And go up.

“I went for a monochromatic look with touches of timber to bring warmth and depth,” Wilson says. She also grouped items of a similar colour to create cohesion as well as a less cluttered look and used mirrors to reflect light, expand views and introduce the illusion of space.

Wilson also cleverly uses her deck as an extra living room. “It’s covered and pretty much weatherproof,” she says. “I’ve got a dining table out there as well as a lounge, a fridge and a pot-belly stove. I love to entertain and this works beautifully.”

Two months into her intrepid move to a bend on the beautiful river, the designer is sanguine about her new digs.

“Sure, something like this can be daunting,” Wilson says. “It’s certainly a challenge, but I’ve found it totally liveable. If you plan well, size doesn’t really matter. You can have the home you want.”

The best thing, though? “After being lucky enough to live in places like Drummoyne and Birchgrove, I’ve still got my water views here.”