Putting old euros to a novel use

last updated 8 January 2015

How does an unemployed Irish artist wind up living in a $1.8 billion home? asked Nick Carbone in Time.com. Answer: Last year “the Central Bank of Ireland was just giving money away”—in shredded form. Frank Buckley hauled off two trailers filled with decommissioned and shredded euro notes. He used the bills, formed into 6-inch-by-2-inch bricks, to build himself an apartment in a vacant Dublin office building, complete with a carpet made of shredded euros. Buckley himself was a victim of Ireland’s boom and crash. Despite having no income, he was able to secure a no-down-payment mortgage on a house worth nearly $500,000 outside Dublin, only to see the house’s value later plummet. One upside of his new home: It’s fantastically insulated. It seems “worthless bills can help construct a better home than the legal tender kind.”