Ground floor, first door on the lake side
The Rainbuilders Room
This is a room of this villa. No separate business owns it, it has no separate address, and nobody opens an outside door to get there. The casino is the lamp room, the first door on the right of the hall, under the bedroom they call the pier room.
From the desk you walk twenty paces along the hall and the door is there. That is the whole journey, which matters in a place where it is minus twenty for six weeks of the year. One of us is on that door for the whole of every open hour, and it is the only way in: the lamp room's outside door to the veranda was taken out in 1948 and the boarding over it is a different width, which anybody can see.
- Hours Thursday to Sunday, eight in the evening until midnight
- Size Three tables and a counter with four stools
- Age 18, photographic proof, checked every visit
- Dress Outdoor boots stay in the porch, as they do for the whole house
The room
Three tables is what the lamp room takes, and three is what it will take. On a Thursday in November one is open. Through July all three are, and on those evenings the casino door keeps a tally, the room being rated at twenty and the villa being a timber building from 1912.
It was a lamp room, so it is plain and it is lined: tongue and groove to the ceiling, painted a grey-green that was matched from under the shelf, with the shelf itself left where it is and the forty-one numbers still legible on it. The ceiling grille is above it. There is no music. The loudest thing in the room is the clock, which is a wall clock with a pendulum and which the staff are told to read out loud the first time anybody asks what time it is.
About boots: they come off in the porch, like everywhere else in this house, from October to April. The floor in the lamp room is 1912 pine and it has taken enough already.
Age and proof of it
The Finnish casino age is 18 and this door keeps to it and nobody is let off it, including the guest in the room over the ceiling.
Proof is checked every visit, not once per stay. That includes the guest who ate in the dining room an hour before and spoke to the person now on the door. A passport, a Finnish identity card, or an EU identity card or driving licence is accepted. A picture of any of them held up on a phone is not an identity card, and the refusal is not a discussion.
No one under 18 crosses into the casino at any hour, the closed hours included, and that takes in coming to look at the lamp shelf. People do ask to see the lamp shelf. There is a photograph of it on the wall of the hall for exactly that reason.
Limits, and how an evening ends
The person working the casino floor settles the limit with you. Say your figure before you sit down and it goes on the sheet and is kept to. Ask them to choose it for you and they will, and it will be under your own figure.
Stopping is arranged in person at the desk in the hall, twenty paces away. Never at the tables, never by telephone, never by message. A self-exclusion is written out at the hall desk, runs from that evening, and is lifted only by going back to it yourself. Nobody at the counter can lift it and nobody will try.
There is no credit of any kind on the casino floor and there is no cash machine anywhere on this property. The nearest is in the city, four kilometres away, and the last bus back passes at ten past eleven, which is fifty minutes before the room closes and which has ended more evenings than any rule we could write.
Nothing on this site is a game
What there is is one casino room off the hall of a villa at Rauhalahdentie 11. There is nothing else. The site describes a villa and a room in it. Nothing is played on it, nothing is staked through it, no account is kept and no money is moved.
To play you come down the gravel to the villa, show proof of age at the door off the hall, and sit down. That door is the whole of the entrance, and this page is no part of the thing behind it.