P.E.I. woman returns to houses that her father built entirely out of bottles

In the last four years of his life, Edouard Arsenault began collecting bottles and built four unique housing structures entirely made from his findings.

A Prince Edward Island woman took a trip down memory lane this week, as she explored a magical place her father built more than 40 years ago.

“It’s a really special place,” said Regeanne Arsenault, whose father built the original ‘Bottle Houses’ in Cape Egmont near Wellington, P.E.I.

They were built by Edouard Arsenault to look like gingerbread houses, made from glass and have a magical feel.

“It is my dad who built them in the last four years of his life,” said Arsenault, whose father started collecting bottles in 1979 to build the unique structures after seeing a post card of similar bottle houses in BC. He started the first house in 1980 and nearly completed a chapel before he passed away at 70-years-old in 1984.

“He would have collected the bottles the previous winter and cleaned them up in the basement of the house,” she said.

People have been married at the glass altar in the bottle chapel and have celebrated anniversaries walking through the garden that houses three buildings built with more than 30,000 mostly liquor bottles.

Arsenault joked that the bottles did not come from his own private drinking bottle collection.

“If they had, I don’t think he would have done this.”