In 1922, American engineer Elis F. Stenman began building a summer house in Rockport, Massachusetts, using an unusual material for the walls: old newspapers. The Times of India reported on the structure's unusual history.
The frame, floor and roof were built from traditional wood, but Stenman chose newspaper for the walls, initially treating the paper as an experimental form of insulation. He collected old newspapers himself and gathered more from friends and neighbors, then glued them together in thick layers using a homemade paste made from flour and water, mixed with apple peels and other adhesive ingredients. He coated the finished panels with varnish to protect them from the elements.
The experiment grew far larger than planned. The house eventually used around 100,000 newspapers, with some sections of wall containing up to 215 layers of paper. Stenman had originally intended to cover the unusual walls with traditional wood paneling, but after seeing how hard the surface became once glued and varnished, he decided to leave the newsprint exposed.
A Family Summer Home
Stenman and his wife used the house as a summer residence until 1930. A porch with a wide roof was later added to the building, giving the paper walls extra protection.
Convinced of the material's durability, Stenman did not stop at the walls. He began making furniture out of newspaper, tightly rolling sheets into a kind of paper log that could be shaped into individual pieces. Other items had an ordinary base but were covered in newspaper. Even a piano received a paper exterior.
A Time Capsule of the Era
The furniture became a kind of archive of the period. One tabletop preserved material about Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight of 1927, while another item contains references to Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign. An old clock was built using newspapers from the capitals of the 48 U.S. states that existed at the time.
By the late 1920s, visitors were already coming to see the unusual house, and it later became a museum.
Still Standing Today
The "Paper House" in Rockport remains privately owned by the family today and continues to operate as a museum. Some of the paper surfaces have worn naturally over time, making the newspaper text in places even more visible.
Times of India summarized that it began as an experimental summer house in 1922 and still stands in Rockport more than a century later, noting that the wooden frame, protective varnish and later additions all played a part in its survival, but that the feature that keeps drawing visitors is the same one Stenman started testing at the beginning: hundreds of layers of old newspaper still visible on the walls of the Massachusetts house.
