Beer cans and bottles, driftwood and wire, limestone as logs, carved architecture are just a few of the surprising materials used at some of the newest Historic Artists' Homes and Studios.

In January 2025, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios (HAHS) program announced its newest class of affiliate members—its largest single class to date. These 19 sites celebrate artist-built environments where artists both lived and worked.

Among these new 19 affiliate members are several sites that celebrate and preserve the work of artists who used unconventional materials, either by design or necessity (or both). Explore the unorthodox techniques used by five artists who bedecked their homes and studios in works from found and local objects. Each does more than display art, also telling the stories of the way artists’ visions evolved over time, and the way their works were designed to interact with their immediate communities.

John Milkovisch’s Beer Can House (Houston, Texas)

The name kind of says it all. Milkovisch used every single part of a can to create and cover the modest family bungalow where he and his wife Mary raised their family. Over two decades, Milkovisch, who worked as an upholsterer for the railroad, used a linoleum knife and tin snips to cut the bottom and top of cans, flattening the panels, and using the pull tabs, said Cody Ledvina, archivist and grant officer at Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, which has managed the Beer Can House since buying it in 2001.

Milkovisch made the cans into flat sheets and applied them like aluminum siding. Covered with an estimated 50,000 aluminum cans, the house is a shiny, folk-art beacon. While Milkovisch didn’t consider himself an artist, he used the cans, concrete, a marble collection, linoleum and more to create his iconic space. Over the years he covered large planters, the patio, walkways, the front and back of the house and fences. In addition to the siding sheets and stepping stones, he made garlands from wire and pull tabs and created curtains from the aluminum cans, in a meditative process that was “almost monk-like,” Ledvina said.

The sound that the cans make is an important part of the installation, Ledvina said. “When a stiff wind comes there, it sounds like pure static. It’s cacophonous, and it's beautiful.” Milkovisch used beer cans from cheap, local Texas beers. These are the “Goldilocks of cans,” which makes for a challenge for Orange Show when they are looking for cans to replace and restore elements of the house. They were not steel cans, but cans made from the late 1950s to the 1980s. These aluminum cans are not as light as aluminum cans are now. The organization receives donated cans to help with restoration efforts, and Ledvina estimated that about 30 percent of donated cans received are usable.

Beer Can House is open to the public for free thanks to a sponsorship from Saint Arnold's Brewing Company. While admission fees had been relatively modest prior to this sponsorship, Ledvina said attendance and donations are up significantly since the sponsorship. The house’s exterior is visible from the street, so people can drive by to see it, as they did when Milkovisch was alive.

“Grandma” Prisbrey’s Bottle Village (Simi Valley, California)

It wasn’t until the age of 60 that Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey taught herself to construct buildings from cement, cinder blocks, colored glass bottles and other objects found in the local dump. For more than two decades, Prisbrey created, experimenting with technique and structure. What started as a place to put her quirky pencil collection, turned into a true village, with multiple buildings, including the remarkable Round House, with its chapel windows and amber-colored glass, as well as mosaic pathways, sculptures like the Leaning Tower of Bottle Village, and gardens.

Illustrator Jeff Wack befriended Prisbrey and saw the value in her work. In 1979, he helped found Preserve Bottle Village, a nonprofit intended to preserve the works and her legacy. Prisbrey, who was the mother of seven, died in 1988. She did most of the construction at the imaginative, rambling site herself, Wack said, with some help with roofs and other construction elements.

In 1994, the Northridge earthquake caused significant damage to many of the structures. The all-volunteer Preserve Bottle Village continues to advocate for Prisbrey’s work and legacy. Volunteers lead tours of the site, although some of the structures can only be seen from the outside, due to structural integrity concerns. California State University Channel Islands is the official repository of Prisbrey’s work and Wack hopes that some of the pieces that are archived there may eventually be returned to, or showcased, at the Simi Valley site, once it is restored.

“She was upcycling before it was invented,” Wack said.

Mary Nohl Art Environment (Fox Point, Wisconsin)

Mary Nohl described herself simply as “a woman who likes tools.” But the artist, who lived from 1914 to 2001, spent a lifetime creating stained glass, paintings, sculptures and even hand-painted clothing, from her family home on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. She had more than 3,500 works at the house just 60 feet from the great lake, including 59 concrete sculptures made from local beach sand and stone.

Nohl inherited family wealth (at a time when women were not generally thought to be good stewards of money), and as a result she did not have to sell her work to support herself. That meant that most of her work was still in her possession and was left to the Kohler Foundation when she died. While she had the means to purchase materials, she liked to work with found objects, and driftwood, wire, stones and other items often are part of the source material for her work. Many of the sculptures are life size and figural in form, while inside the cottage is replete with colorful elements; she even used carpet swatches as brushes for painting walls and furniture.

Her house and sculptures underwent a major renovation in 2015-2016, and 80 percent of her works are preserved at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, where they are open to the public for free. The lakeside cottage, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005, features the outdoor sculptures, which require annual conservation. Given the fragile environment and the small scale of the cottage, it is open by limited appointment.

Prophet Isaiah’s Second Coming House (Niagara Falls, New York)

Isaiah Robertson was a Jamaican immigrant who called himself “Prophet.” He was hired to hang drywall at Mount Erie Baptist Church and while there received two divine visions: one to create an intricate wood paneled design for the church, and one to prepare his single-story home where he lived with his wife, for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Starting in 2005 on his home, Robertson —who did not consider himself an artist—created brightly colored paintings and wood carvings, directed, he said, by God. The iconography includes Biblical images and a 25-foot wooden cross, plus other signs, numbers and symbols. The work adorned both the inside and the outside of the home, with beadwork, carvings, and paintings on surfaces from ceiling to floor. He used the materials that were available to him, using paint from the paint store (hundreds of cans were found inside the house) and silk flowers from the dollar store and assorted materials.

Robertson died in 2020, and his wife, Gloria Dolson-Robertson, took many of the freestanding interior items with her when she moved out. A comprehensive stabilization and restoration effort took place between 2021-2023, using all local contractors, Niagara Falls National Heritage Area staff, and nationally-recognized preservation specialists to replicate Robertson’s “perfectly imperfect” artistic style to conserve and recreate damaged or missing pieces. Replicated exterior pieces with metal and plastic were used rather than wood to withstand the elements of Western New York winters. Original exterior wood pieces are on display inside so that guides can discuss the challenges Robertson faced in constructing his multi-year intuitive art site, given the limitations of the weather, his budget and his experience. The site was opened to the public in 2024, with guided tours covering the issues relevant to Robertson, including immigration, religious iconography and self-expression.

Prophet Isaiah’s Second Coming House is now an initiative of the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area, an organization that emphasizes community development and cultural heritage in the area.

S.P. Dinsmoor’s Cabin Home and Garden of Eden (Lucas, Kansas)

S. P. Dinsmoor was a Civil War veteran, a retired schoolteacher, retired farmer, and thinker. At one point, Dinsmoor ran for a Populist party nomination for office, but when that didn’t work out, he decided to build a home and art environment that would help tell the story of the common man amidst the dangers of monopolies, corporate greed, bank trusts and Social Darwinism. Dinsmoor was 64 years when he became a sculptor, taking 113 tons of cement and turning them into his home and gardens (and finally resting place, with 150 sculptures on site. While use of concrete was not unusual, Dinsmoor’s methods and use of it was, said Erika Nelson, cultural services director for the site. He used local quarried limestone, notched and dovetailed as if they were in a log cabin, for the house, as the large timbers needed for a log cabin were not native to Kansas. The home has three stories, 11 rooms, attached porches and walkways and an on-site mausoleum, where Dinsmoor was laid to rest, in a concrete coffin that he made. No two doors or windows in the home are the same size