A lush home...

...or should that be "a home for a lush?"

Dig this story:

A house in Western Australia's south-west is being built entirely from recycled wine bottles.

Around 13,500 wine bottles will be used in the walls of the house, which owner Peter Little says will save energy.

He says by filling the bottles with water, the entire building will be insulated.

The basic idea is nothing new. I've seen a few houses made out of bottles -- some built as novelties, some because bottles were plentiful where the houses were built -- but the notion of filling them with water is a fresh twist to the problem of insulation.

Here's a postcard image of a bottle house in Tonapah, Nevada...



Of course course there are places where this might be impractical. A hard winter could shatter the walls if you tried this in a frigid, inhospitable place such as, say, Idaho. I'd use antifreeze as a filler in that case.

And it doesn't strike me as terribly practical in places where earthquakes are likely. A house that can twist apart is bad enough; having your abode shatter around you would be traumatic, to say the least.

Still, this sounds like a good idea. I'm all for using recycled materials wherever possible; people have built successfully using haybales and adobe, old tires and and many other strange and unlikely raw materials.

I remember being inside a bottle house on a bright, sunny day. The light was beautiful.