Visitors to the Paper House in Rockport, Massachusetts, can pay their admission by Venmo or drop it through a mail slot, and nobody checks. “We use the honor system. People are basically honest,” caretaker Edna Beaudoin told Harvard Magazine in 2025.
Beaudoin is the grandniece of Elis Stenman, the man who built the house. Stenman was a mechanical engineer who lived in Cambridge and designed machines that made paper clips, according to the house’s website. He began the summer house in 1922 as a hobby.
The frame, floor, and roof are wood, like any house. The walls are another matter. They are about an inch thick, made of 215 layers of newspaper glued together with flour and water, then sealed with varnish, per the website. Mental Floss adds that the glue included apple peels. SPACES Archives estimates more than 100,000 newspapers line the walls.
The furniture is paper, too. The chairs and tables are built from rolled newspaper, and the writing desk is covered in coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic flight, according to Harvard Magazine. The grandfather clock holds papers from the capital of every state, and since it was made in the 1930s, it has no Alaska or Hawaii, per the website.
It was not entirely paper. The house had electricity and running water in summer, but no bathroom, so an outhouse stood in the woods, according to the website. Stenman’s wife, Esther, made the window drapes from strips of magazine covers, per Atlas Obscura.
Why newspaper? Beaudoin told Roadtrippers that it was cheap. “Newspapers were pretty inexpensive; everybody gave him their papers,” she said. The most common question visitors ask is simply “why?” and she says she doesn’t know the answer, per the website.
The Stenmans opened the Paper House to visitors as an informal museum and moved into a regular house next door in 1930, per Harvard Magazine. Beaudoin has been its caretaker since 1995 and lives next door. Admission is $3 for adults and $1 for children ages 6 to 10, according to the house’s visitor page.
The house is open from the second Friday of April through the last Sunday of October, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at 52 Pigeon Hill St. This year, the season ends Oct. 25. It is also open on weekends in November, weather permitting.
America has a long tradition of building with surprising materials. Jim Reinders built a 96-foot circle of 39 cars in a Nebraska field as a memorial to his father, while Simon Rodia spent 33 years building 17 towers in his Los Angeles yard from bottles, tiles, and seashells.
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