My Favorite Houses Series: The Paper House

Some houses are built from brick. Some are built from stone. One of my favorite houses in America was built from the morning paper.

And not metaphorically.

In 1922, Elis Fritiof Stenman, a mechanical engineer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began experimenting with an idea for a summer cottage in Rockport. The roof, floor and wooden frame would be conventional. The walls would be made from newspaper.

Why?

No one seems to know.

Elis was an engineer, an inventor and apparently a man who did not require everyone around him to understand what he was doing before he did it.

He read three newspapers a day, which gave him a steady supply of building materials. Once his neighbors and friends learned what he was attempting, they began donating their newspapers too.

By the time the house was completed in 1924, an estimated 100,000 sheets of newsprint had been folded, rolled, glued, pressed and varnished.

The walls were made from newspaper panels reportedly 215 layers thick. Elis created his own glue using flour, water and apple peels. He protected the exterior with marine varnish and decorated it with pieces of newspaper folded into squares and triangles, selecting pages with large headlines and interesting graphics.

He wanted people to be able to read the house.

Visitors who came to see what he was building were sometimes handed a sheet of newspaper and told to start folding. Evidently, touring the property came with an assignment.

Once every paper surface had been carefully sealed, Elis and his wife, Esther, moved in. But Elis was not finished.

He made chairs, tables, desks, stools, bookshelves, a floor lamp, a cot and a grandfather clock from tightly rolled newspaper. Esther contributed window curtains woven from strips of magazine covers.

Even the furniture told stories. A writing desk was made from accounts of Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. A radio cabinet carried coverage of Herbert Hoover's 1928 presidential campaign. The piano Esther played was covered with reports of Admiral Byrd's expeditions to the North and South Poles.

Elis reportedly received thousands of offers to buy his newspaper furniture. He refused them all.

You might expect someone who built a house from paper to have designed something equally outlandish. But Elis was a practical engineer. From the outside, his creation looked like a fairly conventional little cottage.

It had only two rooms. A kitchen stove and sink once occupied the space where the fireplace now stands, and Elis and Esther slept in a loft bed near the roof. The house had electricity and running water, although no bathroom.

The outhouse stood in the yard and, perhaps disappointingly, was not made of paper.

Elis and Esther lived there during the summers until 1930. By then, so many curious people were arriving to see it that they moved into a conventional house next door and turned the Paper House into an attraction.

More than a century later, it is still standing.

That may be the most remarkable part of the story. A house made from yesterday's newspapers has survived New England winters, blizzards, hurricanes and generations of people reasonably assuming it could not possibly last.

But it did.

Real estate is usually described in terms of square footage, construction quality, location and resale value. All of those things matter. But the houses people remember are often the ones that reveal something about the person who imagined them.

The Paper House began with one curious man asking whether an ordinary, disposable object could become something permanent.

Apparently, it could.

Sometimes the most unforgettable house on the street is built from exactly what everyone else threw away.

– Sarah