Welcome to Chelyabinsk, Russia where you will find a peculiar house that has been created almost completely from champagne bottles. This amazing work has been done by a local resident who is 52 years old, Hamidullah Ilchibaev. The house is known as Palace Oz and has become a famous landmark of the region.
Hamidullah has been making things using vodka and beer bottles for quite some time now and his children were always amazed and proud of his work. In fact, they were the ones who kept encouraging him into building a house like this someday, however, Hamidullah always thought it was an impossible feat to accomplish.
When his second son passed away at the age of 18, he decided to build the house in the memory of his son. Thus began his search for suitable material for the project. For the construction of 99-sq.meter house, he collected more than 12,000 empty bottles of champagne. Some of these were bought while others were donated by the restaurants nearby.
Hamidullah says, “When I started to build, I hadn’t even imagined that there are so many different kinds of bottles of champagne.” He found out that the bottles varied in quality along with size and color. Eventually, he made use of a special glass cutter to cut the tops off the collected bottles to impart same size to them. Over the course of time, he has become an expert on bottles and is capable of identifying the diameter of any bottle up to the accuracy of a millimeter.
The construction of the house used bottles like bricks. They were stacked up on a solid foundation. The insulation and neck of the bottle has a gap the size of finger’s thickness. A solution was poured in this gap that upon solidification is capable of holding the bottles in their place firmly. Coming to how durable the house is, Hamidullah claims that it will last for 100 years at least. He also told that if any bottle breaks, it can be replaced quite easily.
The exterior of the house has a unique look due to bottles, however, you can’t tell the difference once you’re inside. It looks like a regular home, however, it cost 5 times less than what a regular house would have cost. Hamidullah, however, says when he was building the house he was not concerned with the price but rather building it the way his son would have wanted it.
He gave the house to his eldest son as a wedding gift and his daughter-in-law is very proud of the house, saying that she can’t wait to furnish it!