— CORNER HARVEST · BLACK LABEL —
The Trunk Coop
a vintage steamer trunk, reborn as a home for beautiful birds
You have thought about it. Fresh eggs on the counter, something alive in the yard, a thing your kids could actually look after instead of scrolling past. Then you picture the rest of it — mess everywhere, a sagging pen stapled together out of hardware cloth, that chicken-wire-and-plywood look that says prison for birds — and the noise, and the smell, and every bit of the hassle. So you didn’t.
That is the part nobody bothered to solve. We did.
We take a real mid-century steamer trunk — the kind that crossed oceans — and hand-convert it into a self-sufficient quail aviary: camera inside, solar on top, shade that pops open like it's on holiday, and a covey of our own hand-raised coturnix quail if you want the whole world in one piece of furniture. Every trunk is one of a kind. Every cut is planned around the original hardware, so it never stops being the beautiful object it already was.
Nothing here was manufactured for birds
Every coop on the market is a coop: a box designed to be a box, priced to be replaced. We went the other way entirely. We buy beautiful dead objects — a steamer trunk that crossed an ocean, a case with somebody else’s name still painted on the side — and we bring them back as habitat. Nothing new is made. Nothing is stamped out. The object was already worth having before a single bird moved in.
It is an odd pair of hands to build this with, which is the point: someone who designs AI systems for a living and spent years in fashion before that. So the trunk is smart where being smart actually helps — camera, solar, water that never spills — and left alone everywhere else, because a hundred-year-old brass latch does not need improving. The result is a piece of furniture that happens to be full of birds, rather than a cage you hide behind the garage.
The White Trunk
A restored wooden steamer chest, screened and fitted for a covey of 4–6 — feed pantry behind a divider, gravity water, no-mess ports, day-graze floor, WiFi camera. This is Trunk No. 001 — the prototype of the whole line: every system aboard was engineered on this exact trunk, and its owner gets the first-ever example of something nobody else on earth makes. One of one, and there will never be another No. 001. Ready to go home within two weeks.
$1,200 · Trunk No. 001, one of one · later trunks are built to order from $1,000 · the Tsang Trunk, built to order with all-new equipment, is $2,000 all-inclusive
SoCal delivery & setup included · nationwide shipping quoted by ZIP — we arrange everything, you prepay the actual freight · local pickup welcome
Buy The White Trunk →The Tsang Trunk
A riveted all-metal steamer trunk that crossed an ocean with H. S. Tsang\u2019s name painted on its side — restored with its story intact and given the full estate treatment: WiFi camera, solar power, pop-up shade, automatic feed and water — a living centerpiece for a garden, patio, or half-acre with room for wonder.
$2,000 — all-inclusive: trunk, camera + solar, Day Aviary dome, starter guide, delivery & setup
Take the trunk alone, or add the starter covey (+$150)— six of our hand-raised laying coturnix hens, first feed included, with a walkthrough of the daily two minutes they ask of you. Coveys come from our own hatches, so there’s a wait (~8 weeks) — which is exactly the time it takes to get your trunk delivered, placed, and dialed in before the birds arrive. Kids get it instantly: it’s a treasure chest with birds inside.
Choose your covey
same trunk, four different lives — pick yours
Five or six speckled eggs a day, every day — hens lay ~300 a year and need no rooster to do it. Quiet, simple, breakfast forever.
Our English Whites raised in rotation — hatch to harvest in six to eight weeks, and growers need a little less room, so the trunk holds more of them. The fastest honest meat there is.
The golden ratio — hens stay relaxed, every egg comes fertile. Eggs for the table, chicks for the future (incubator coming to the shop), and when the covey grows… you get a second trunk.
For the keeper who wants fresh eggs and a beautiful safe home for the birds — without birdwatching as a hobby. The graze floor inside means they forage the lawn all day on their own. Check the camera when you like; collect eggs when you like.
The birds are part of the design
A beautiful cage full of flighty, screaming birds is a beautiful mistake. So we breed for the experience as much as the eggs: calm, tame, handled from day one, the sort of bird that walks toward a child instead of away. Good layers, good manners, good personalities — in that order, and we cull nothing from the line that fails the second one.
Quail are the easy start. If you want something else — miniature chickens, a mixed household sharing one trunk, a layout built around a particular corner of your yard — that is a conversation, not a catalogue. Every trunk is commissioned anyway. Tell us what you actually want living in it.
Who ends up wanting one
Nobody buys this for one reason, which is how we knew it was worth building.
And then there is the part we can’t put in a spec list: your friends come over, see it on the patio with a glass of wine in their hand, and ask what it is.
Commission one
Built one at a time in University Heights, San Diego · local delivery & setup · questions: hello@cornerharvest.farm · IG @cornerharvest