“You might say this home built from 30,000 glass embalming fluid bottles has been perfectly preserved…”
That’s how one real estate agent described Cheyenne, Wyoming’s one-of-a-kind Crystal Castle, which was recently listed for sale at the bargain price of $325,000. The current owner has used the 766-square-foot one-bedroom, one-bath home, which sits on 3.34 acres, as a vacation cabin, rather than a primary residence, and the listing agent hopes it can become home to a new family soon.
And yes, the eight-inch-thick exterior walls of the home are indeed constructed from empty square-bottomed, pint-size bottles of embalming fluid embedded in concrete.
Following in another’s footsteps
Construction of the Crystal Castle was completed in 1963 by J. Harry Widholm — who was not, as you might think, involved in deathcare. However, Widholm’s inspiration for his Wyoming construction came from a similar home he had visited 10 years earlier — one that was actually the brainchild of a retired funeral director.
Called, simply, the Glass House, the original embalming bottle home was built in Canada by David H. Brown, who retired from deathcare in 1952 after 35 years in the profession. He built his glass home on a foundation of solid rock on the shore of Kootenay Lake in Sanca, British Columbia.
Today, Brown’s Glass House is a tourist attraction. Visitors can tour its three main rooms, each arranged in a circular shape to form an overall cloverleaf pattern. The structure is 48 feet in length and 24 feet wide, containing a total of 1,200 square feet of floor space. The grounds of the Glass House features thousands of flowers and a footbridge that is also made of embalming fluid bottles.
Extreme recycling?
Brown had amassed quite a collection of embalming fluid bottles as a funeral director, but not enough to construct an entire home for his family. So after his retirement, he traveled across western Canada collecting empty bottles from his friends and former colleagues. Eventually, he had acquired the 500,000 bottles he needed to build the house, bridge, and even a lighthouse on his property.
It is said that Brown built the home simply to “indulge a whim of a peculiar nature.” It’s likely that Widholm embarked on his construction for the same reason, as it was soon after visiting Brown’s Glass House in Canada that Widholm began gathering his own collection of embalming fluid bottles.
Widholm eventually amassed 30,000 bottles from funeral homes across three states, according to a May 5, 1963 feature in Montana’s Billings Gazette newspaper. From 1961 to 1963, Widholm and his brother hand-washed each bottle “to prevent discoloration and odor” and placed them in an overall “barbell” pattern that Widholm had designed himself.
Like the current owner, Widholm only used the house as a weekend and summer place. He sold the house in 1972, and in 1973 it went on the market again for $17,500. Then, as now, the unique opportunity for someone to purchase an embalming-bottle house for their very own made news across the country.
So if turrets, round rooms, and glistening exteriors are your thing, and you’re looking for a country house in Wyoming, and you don’t have kids (or enemies) who like to throw stones, this $325,000 charmer might be just the home for you!
