A house where everything is from newspapers: walls, furniture, and even curtains

If you ever find yourself in Rockport, Massachusetts, take the time to drive down Pigeon Hill Street and find a sign that says "Paper House" ("Newspaper House"). Park at the curb and go take a closer look at this unique house, which looks like a simple log cabin. In fact, it is built entirely out of newspapers.

The history of the newspaper house dates back to 1922, when a mechanical engineer named Alice Stenman began to build a small summer house. It all started like any other house, with a wooden frame, a roofing roof and floors, but when it came to the walls, Stenman had an original idea. The walls of the newspaper house are made of many layers of old newspapers glued together about an inch thick, and they are covered with a good layer of varnish on top.

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Everything inside the house is also made of paper. Stenman made chairs, tables, bookshelves and even curtains and clocks from the pages of newspapers and magazines. Only the piano is made of wood and covered with paper for the sake of uniformity, and the fireplace is made of brick for obvious reasons.

No one knows what exactly prompted Stenman to use newspapers in the construction. His heirs suggest that he wanted to try cheap and affordable thermal insulation material during the Great Depression. Even the glue is homemade: made from flour, water and apple peelings.

Maybe Stenman was experimenting with recycling, or maybe he just loved paper. Anyway, he designed machines for the production of paper clips. At first he wanted to cover the outside of the walls with clapboard, but the paper survived the first winter so well that he decided that additional protection was not needed.

Stenman completed the house in just two years and lived in it until 1930, but even after that he continued experimenting with the reuse of waste paper. During the twenty years that Stenman spent on building a house and making furniture and interior items, he used about one hundred thousand newspapers. The owner died in 1942, and since then the newspaper house has turned into a museum.

Almost ninety years later, the upper layers of the walls gradually began to peel off, exposing fragments of notes and advertising publications from the past, which are so fond of reading visitors to the newspaper house. On the desk you can read a message about Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and the radio is plastered with news about Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign. On the piano you can see reports about Admiral Baird's expeditions to the North and South Poles. Over time, the layers of newspapers will continue to peel off, and more and more new messages from the past will be shown.