ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Motorcycle Crate Ceiling

by Mimi Zeiger

Photos by Elena Dorfman and Kyle Minor

Kyle Minor takes his office space into overdrive.

Was: Construction Trailer
Now: Office Space
Who: Kyle Minor
Day Job: Artist and designer
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Maker of: Construction trailer office
Square footage: 800 square feet
Site: kyleminordesign.com

Kyle Minor had dreams of a compound in the country when he bought a construction trailer from a local San Francisco contractor. An artist and designer, he figured he’d renovate the ugly trailer, which came with a full kitchen and bathroom, into a home and haul it up to some pastoral spot to live in year round. But when push came to shove, he didn’t want to leave the city. So, he did what anyone with an extra-large workshop on a pier on the edge of the San Francisco Bay would do—he installed the trailer inside the workshop and transformed it into 800 square feet of really nice office space. 

Minor enlisted the help of Survival Research Laboratories, a renegade performance group made up of metalworkers with a taste for fire, to help him move the trailer. (Picture a double-wide trailer perched on an enormous forklift rolling backward through the city streets in the dead of night, but don’t try it at home.) He then placed the trailer on top of two shipping containers to ensure a view of Alcatraz just outside the pier’s high windows. The remodeled interior is pretty high end—birch plywood walls, a fancy European stove—but Minor, an avid motorcyclist, couldn’t resist slipping in a few biker tricks. The office ceiling is made out of motorcycle shipping crates he salvaged from local shops. Minor is calmly philosophical about the daredevil feats it took to create the project. “You take some risks, you make mistakes, and it’s not a big failure if it doesn’t work out,” he muses. Looks like it worked out just fine.