A timber villa of 1912, ninety metres above the water
Squared logs, boarded outside and painted the ochre the whole shore was painted in that decade. Eight rooms, one dining room, and a lamp room that has not held a lamp since 1927.
The villa
Built by people who sold the wood it is made of
The Kuopio timber trade put up a line of villas along this shore between 1900 and 1920, and this is one of the later ones. The walls are squared logs, dovetailed at the corners and then boarded over on the outside, which is why it looks like a board house and behaves like a log one. In February that difference is about four degrees.
Nothing has been added to the outside since the veranda was glazed in 1934. The ochre is mixed to the same recipe, with iron oxide and rye flour, and goes on every twelve years. The last coat was 2019.
Rooms
Eight rooms, listed in the order the house gives them
Five on the first floor and three under the roof. No two are the same size and none of them has a number on the door, because the house has always called them by what they look at.
- The corner roomFirst floor, lake and south. The largest, and the only one with two outside walls of glass.
- The green roomFirst floor, lake. Named for a paint colour that was removed in 2009 and put back in 2011.
- The pier roomFirst floor, lake. Directly above the lamp room, and the only room that hears it, faintly.
- The birch roomFirst floor, north. Looks into the birches on the hill side. Coldest in winter, coolest in July.
- The small roomFirst floor, north. Fourteen square metres and a window seat that makes up for it.
- The west atticUnder the roof. A dormer, a slope on two sides, and light until half past ten in June.
- The east atticUnder the roof. The sun arrives in it at half past three in June and wakes you.
- The back atticUnder the roof, facing the hill. The quietest room in the villa by a long way.
The lamp room
The casino room is the old lamp room, off the hall
It belongs to this villa. The casino floor holds three tables and a counter, and it opens four evenings a week. Until electricity reached this shore in 1927 every paraffin lamp in the house was carried to this room each morning to be cleaned, trimmed and filled. There were forty-one of them. The shelf that held them runs the length of the north wall, with the numbers still painted on it, and the ventilation grille that took the fumes out is in the ceiling where it always was.
From the desk in the hall you take the first door on the right, towards the lake side: twenty paces, and that door is the only way into the casino. One of us is on that door for the whole of every open hour, and the rule at it is 18 with photographic proof, every visit.
The lake
Kallavesi is the fourth largest lake in the country
The water is four hundred metres down the hill and ninety metres below the villa. There is a boathouse, a sauna beside it that is lit every evening from five, and a jetty you can walk off into water that is 20 degrees in July and ice in January.