Historic Hazel Park ‘bottle house’ hits market for first time in 70+ years

When he learned about a quirky, nearly century-old metro Detroit home made from concrete blocks embedded with thousands of glass bottles, Carl Schiller says he knew he had to save it.

“As soon as I saw the place, my jaw just hit the floor,” Schiller tells Metro Times. “I could not believe how cool it was. And I also couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it.”

An Oakland County native with 30 years of real estate experience, Schiller was unaware of the modest yet unique property, built in 1937 and located just off of John R Road at 39 W. Elza Ave. in Hazel Park.

The home’s longtime owners reached out via his real estate business website housefullofcash.com and inquired if he’d be interested in purchasing the property, which had been passed down through their family since 1951.

Schiller learned it was originally built by one Omar Reese, an assembly line worker at Hamtramck’s Dodge Main factory who couldn’t afford to buy a home for his family, but set out to build one himself. At the time, labor disputes among timber workers in the Upper Peninsula and United Auto Workers in the Detroit area made lumber expensive, but Reese had an idea to build his home using concrete blocks, which he embedded with colorful pieces of bottles. 

“He cleaved off the butts of the bottles and stuck them in, purely because he liked light refraction off the colored bottles,” Schiller says. “It was very cool.”

According to Schiller, it took Reese at least two years to build the house with he and his family living in the basement throughout the construction process.

The home is dotted with some 20,000 antique bottles, including green 7-Up, red wine, and navy blue Noxzema lotion, the latter of which inspired a fresh coat of bold paint on the home’s garage door.

“For me, it’s a 90-year piece of art. All these bottles are frozen in concrete time,” Schiller says, adding that it’s “a Detroit-specific piece.”

Schiller says other potential buyers offered more money, but the owners wanted to sell it to someone who would preserve it. 

“She said, ‘I want to sell it, but I want to sell it to someone that’s going to keep it,’” Schiller says.

“Little did I know what I was in for,” he adds.

The home had fallen into disrepair over the years, with a leaky roof causing water damage. Schiller says he quickly burned through his initial $50,000 budget in a rehab that took four years to complete.

“This firmly went from business operation to labor of love,” he says, adding, “We really had to take the entire interior down to the studs.”

The project required all new ductwork and plumbing. Since the home is so cozy, Schiller says he decided to make the interior “airy and light and open,” which entailed taking down walls between the main living room and the kitchen to make an open floor layout, making all windows as large as possible, and adding skylights. 

“Pretty much everything had to be replaced,” Schiller says. “That’s why it took so long. But I’m glad that it did, because if there was some world where we were able to do this in three or four months, like a normal full rehab, it wouldn’t have been this cool. We wouldn’t have been able to take this much time with it.”

The home also boasts new quartz counters and hardwood floors. To add some character to the modernized interior, Schiller took a black-and-white Detroit Free Press photo from the 1950s to the Detroit Wallpaper Co., which created a custom wallpaper used on accent panels throughout the home.

To prepare the home for sale, Schiller says he even hand-scrubbed each and every bottle himself.

“It got me acquainted with the bottles and what all the cool ones were,” he says. 

Also included is an attached property with a separate entrance that Schiller believes may have started off as a detached garage and could be repurposed as an artist’s studio or a home office. But he says he originally purchased the home with the idea of making it into an Airbnb. 

“I want to find someone that I can either sell to or maybe even partner with to turn it into a short-term rental and really turn it back over to the community,” he says, “so anyone that wants to participate in the experience would have the opportunity to book it and do so.”

He adds, “It was more about what it was and what it represented and just being a cool piece of metro Detroit history.”

The home is 1,225 square feet and includes two bedrooms, a bathroom, a basement, and a garage. More information about the property is available at hazelparkbottlehouse.com and zillow.com.

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