When Tressa Prisbrey was 60 years old, she wanted to build a small shed for her large pencil collection. In 1956, she found that concrete blocks cost more than she could afford. Rather than give up, the California resident began collecting thousands of discarded glass bottles and household items from a nearby landfill. Over the next 25 years, she turned a one-third-acre lot in Simi Valley into Bottle Village, a well-known folk-art site with 15 structures, shrines, mosaic paths and sculpture gardens. According to historical records kept by Preserve Bottle Village, the non-profit organisation that looks after the site, the project began soon after Prisbrey and her husband parked their trailer on Cochran Street. After buying the land, she had little money left for building materials, so she turned to a local dump to find glass bottles.
Constructing structures out of landfill scraps
Soda bottles usually had a two-cent deposit, so people rarely threw them away. Prisbrey instead collected discarded milk of magnesia bottles, alcohol bottles and other glass containers. She mixed mortar by hand and placed the bottles horizontally in the walls, with their bases facing outwards. The glass allowed natural light to pass through, creating colourful patterns inside the structures. From 1956 to the mid-1960s, Prisbrey built 15 separate structures, each with a single room. Official site records show that three were called Pencil Houses, where she displayed thousands of pencils. Other buildings included the Doll House, which held more than 600 dolls she had rescued from being thrown away. Once she ran out of space to build more structures, Prisbrey began decorating almost every available part of the property. She made mosaic paths from broken tiles and crockery, created a headlight garden from old car parts, and built shrines using seashells, horseshoes and discarded household items.
Art born from grief and showmanship
Folk-art experts and art historians see Bottle Village as both a personal memorial and a remarkable creative achievement. Prisbrey outlived six of her seven children, and she built several parts of the site to remember family members she had lost. Records published by Preserve Bottle Village explain how her personal experiences shaped specific structures. She built the Shell House in just two days after learning that one of her sons was critically ill. The Heart-shaped Shrine was dedicated to her daughter Velma. Although many of the structures were linked to painful events, Prisbrey brought humour and a natural flair for entertaining visitors to her work. As news of the unusual site spread, Bottle Village became a popular local attraction. Prisbrey led daily walking tours and charged visitors admission fees ranging from 25 cents to one dollar. When people asked about her methods and how she worked without standard building materials, Prisbrey gave a straightforward answer. She believed creativity mattered more than money. “Anyone can do something with a million dollars. Look at Disney. But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing and look at the fun I have doing it,” Prisbrey remarked in statements recorded in the project archives.
Critical acclaim and historical preservation
Prisbrey never considered herself a professional artist, but her work gained wider attention in the art world during the 1970s. In 1974, architectural critic Esther McCoy discussed the site’s cultural importance in an essay for a catalogue published by the Walker Art Centre in Minnesota. “At the root of her uniqueness is a divine disorder; she has a passion for all discarded objects and shows a willingness to provide them all, equally, a place in her scheme,” McCoy wrote in her analysis of Prisbrey’s work. Bottle Village received official recognition in 1981, when it was named California State Historical Landmark No. 939. It was later designated a Ventura County Cultural Landmark and a Simi Valley City Landmark. In 1996, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Prisbrey moved to San Francisco in 1982 because of her declining health. She died in 1988 at the age of 92. Ownership of Bottle Village had been transferred to Preserve Bottle Village in 1986. The site received further recognition in 2025, when it became an affiliate member of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios. The national programme is managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and recognises places connected to artists and their work.
