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The Beer Can House

A shimmering oddity on a quiet residential street near Memorial Park, this marvel of folk art may strike some as merely a wacky recycling project. The house's late, longtime owner, John Milkovisch, spent a lifetime decorating his little cottage with empty beer cans—crushed, cut, and flattened—eventually covering the entire exterior and festooning the roof with more than 50,000 pieces of aluminum. The number is easy to believe, not only from the appearance of the house, but by the look of Milkovisch's belly in old snapshots. Featured on the Antiques Roadshow, the Beer Can House is a monument of sorts, to American ingenuity, individuality, and imagination.

Tip: The Beer Can House is just one of several folk-art installations worth exploring around Houston, overseen by the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, which offers tours of sites around the city (www.orangeshow.org).