• Henry Brean / Arizona Daily Star

The 1960s home has walls built and decorated with thousands of empty bottles.

A home built with bottles, rocks, mortar and telephone poles is for sale, and interest has been high among the curious and intrigued.

A recent open house of the Avra Valley home was well attended, especially by neighbors eager to get an inside look at the unique architecture.

Main entrance of the constructed bottle and rock home that is for sale at 1800 N. Camino Altar.

“I felt like a museum curator,” said Holly Greenhalgh, with Coldwell Banker Realty, who is listing the home. “The comments were so intriguing.”

She said many neighbors wanted to get a peek.

“There’s a huge amount of curiosity and fascination,” Greenhalgh said. “I don’t know if a historical society-type of group would like to see it.”

The 2,700-square-foot home has three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

The shower is built into the rock wall and flows like a waterfall.

It is insulated with thousands of bottles, has a guest cottage, outdoor kitchen, three fireplaces, two wood-burning stoves and built-in concrete furniture.

The main bedroom of the constructed rock and bottle home.

In a 1978 Tucson Citizen article, appropriately titled “Throwing no stones,” Theodore and Meletis Bryson spoke of their creation.

In 1964, the couple gathered bottles and mixed mortar to build a carport next to their mobile home.

Over the years, discarded bottles from roadsides and landfills became part of the walls of their new home.

“The bottles keep the house really comfortable,” the late Theodore Bryson told the Citizen at the time. “Insulation is basically air pockets and what has more air than an empty bottle?”

The cottage bathroom at the rock and bottle home.

There were no blueprints or measuring.

“We didn’t have any construction experience,” he said. “When we started, we even had to ask how to mix cement.”

Bryson, a chiropractor, worked nights and weekends on the project, and his wife hauled bottles from the Marana dump.

The subsequent owner added some touches to the home but kept the original “bottle effect” intact.

The 2,700-square-foot home has three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

Greenhalgh knows the person who was taking care of the house and was approached about listing it.

“I do a lot of unique properties, maybe not as unique as this one,” she said. “We tried to get an appraisal but were turned down by three appraisers because it is so unique.”

She was advised to use the square footage for pricing of similar-sized homes in the area.

“There’s no comparable homes, no apples-to-apples,” Greenhalgh said. “This is apples to pineapples.”

The listing price was set at $432,500 for the home that sits on 2.5 acres at 1800 N. Camino Altar.

Greenhalgh said an artist would be an ideal buyer for the property, or an investor who would operate it as a bed-and-breakfast.

“It does capture your attention,” she said. “Some people think it’s like a cave, but it doesn’t feel that way when you are inside.”

Several open houses are scheduled for the coming week.

Contact Holly Greenhalgh at Coldwell Banker at 520-904-7514 or via email at holly.greenhalgh@azmoves.com for more information.

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Contact reporter Gabriela Rico at grico@tucson.com