Most of us toss yesterday's newspaper into the recycling bin without a second thought. But nearly a hundred years ago, one man in Massachusetts looked at that stack of old papers and saw building material. The result is one of the quirkiest houses in America, and it's still standing.
It's called the Paper House, and it sits at 52 Pigeon Hill Street in Rockport, Massachusetts. Engineer Elis F. Stenman built it between 1922 and 1924 as a summer home. The house has a wooden frame, roof, and floor, but its walls are made of thick layers of glued and varnished newspaper. He later filled it with furniture made of rolled newspaper too. In all, about 100,000 newspapers went into the project.
The Man Who Hated Waste
Stenman was a Swedish mechanical engineer who built machines for making paper clips. He also tried, without success, to invent a steam iron. Building a house out of newspaper began as a hobby.
He had always resented the daily waste of newspaper, so he decided to put it to use as insulation for his walls. He made his own glue from flour, water, and sticky ingredients such as apple peel. He mixed it with newspaper and pressed the sheets into panels about one inch thick, each made of around 215 sheets of paper, and fitted them between the wooden frame.
An Experiment That Worked
Stenman had planned to cover the newspaper walls with wood siding. Instead, he decided to leave them exposed, as an experiment to see how well they would hold up. He varnished them for protection and waited.
The walls survived, and that gave him a new idea. Using tightly rolled and varnished newspapers, he started building furniture. Friends and neighbors pitched in by donating their old papers.
The house had electricity and running water, but no bathroom. An ordinary wooden outhouse stood outside. For safety, the fireplace and chimney are brick, though the mantelpiece above the fireplace is made of paper.
Furniture You Can Read
The furniture is where the house really shines. There's a desk made from newspaper accounts of Charles Lindbergh's famous 1927 flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. There's also a grandfather clock made from newspapers from the capital cities of each of the 48 states that existed at the time.
The only piece of furniture that isn't actually made of paper is the piano. It's simply covered with it. Visitors today can still spot old headlines and articles in the walls and furniture, since care has been taken not to cover up the original newsprint when the house is re-varnished.
From Summer Home to Museum
Word got around quickly. By 1927, the Paper House had become a tourist attraction. Postcards of it were sold, and donations from visitors covered Stenman's costs. He and his wife lived there until 1930, and since then it has been used only for display.
In the 1930s, a porch was added all the way around the house, helping protect the paper walls from the weather. The house is still owned by the Stenman family, who run it as a museum, usually open to visitors from spring through fall.
Rockport itself is a seaside town at the tip of Cape Ann, about 40 miles northeast of Boston. So if you're ever exploring the Massachusetts coast, it's worth a stop. Where else can you sit at a desk made of Lindbergh headlines, inside walls that have been holding up the news for a century?
