The villa
Spruce logs squared on four sides, dovetailed, boarded with pine, and painted with iron oxide and rye flour every twelve years.
1912
The Hiltunen family had a sawmill on the north shore and built this as a summer villa, which in Kuopio in 1912 meant June to September and a caretaker for the rest. It became a year-round house in 1948, which is when the double windows went in and the stove in the hall was replaced with something that would hold overnight.
The log walls are 160 millimetres, dovetailed at the corners with the ends cut flush, and the whole thing stands on a stone foundation with a ventilated crawl space under it. That crawl space is why the floors are cold in January and why the building has not rotted in a hundred and fourteen years.
1934
The veranda on the lake side was glazed, which is the only change to the outline of the building. Before that it was open, with a canvas blind. The glazing bars are the 1934 bars, the glass in eleven of the forty-two panes is still 1934 glass, and you can tell which eleven by standing to the side and looking along them.
What is still here from the lamp years
- The lamp shelf in the lamp room, with forty-one numbers painted on it in black.
- The ceiling grille above it, which vented the fumes into the roof space.
- Two oil cans in the hall, which are empty and are not going anywhere.
- The scorch mark on the lamp room floor beside the north window, from something that happened in about 1919 and is not written down anywhere.
What we have done
- 2008: the roof, in sheet metal with a standing seam, as it has been since 1952.
- 2009 to 2014: the eight bathrooms, one or two a winter.
- 2011: the green room repainted in a colour matched from behind a skirting board.
- 2016: ground-source heat, with the loops in the field behind the sauna.
- 2019: the ochre, the whole outside, which takes eleven days and two people.
- 2023: the lamp room lined, wired and fitted out, with the shelf and the grille left where they are.
The people
Eight of us. Two on the desk, three in the kitchen and the dining room, one on the rooms, two on the lamp room door and counter. Five live in Kuopio and three live here. The caretaker's cottage behind the sauna is still a caretaker's cottage.