Paper House

The story

In 1922, Elis F. Stenman—a Swedish mechanical engineer who made his living designing machines to manufacture paper clips—began building a modest summer cottage on Cape Ann. He built a standard timber frame and roof, but when it came to insulating the walls, he turned to the cheapest, most abundant raw material around: daily newspapers. Stenman pressed newsprint into dense layers using a homemade paste of flour, water, and apple peels, then sealed the slabs with varnish. The resulting walls are roughly 215 sheets thick.

The experiment proved so sturdy that Stenman never covered the paper with wooden siding, and he didn't stop at the walls. Over two decades, he rolled, folded, glued, and varnished an estimated 100,000 newspapers into functional household furniture. Walk inside and look closely at the desk: its entire structure is constructed from news reports of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight. The grandfather clock was built from newspapers originating from each of the 48 states in existence at the time, and a radio cabinet is entirely wrapped in newsprint logs.

What makes the place remarkable isn't just that a mechanical engineer built a cottage out of 1920s press runs—it's that the whole structure has survived a century of wet coastal New England winters. Still owned and operated by Stenman's descendants, the house remains practically untouched by modern museum curation, standing quietly on a dead-end residential street.