"In southeast Finland, climate change is turning the winters shorter but stormier, while the summers are getting longer and hotter. Intent on making the most of their seafront property, a pair of local physicians have planned a home for all seasons. Marked by charcoal-black cladding, a pale-green roof, and numerous sea views, the year-round residence has triple-glazed windows to protect against months of freezing temperatures and the increase in rough weather, but can do double-duty as an ideal summer house, thanks to air conditioning, a deck for grilling out and a stretch of private shore line.
Cardiologist Juha Koskinen, 37, and his wife, Anna Jaakola, a 35-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist, paid around $130,000 for the half-acre lot, located just outside Kotka, a medium-size coastal city near Finland's border with Russia, about 90 miles east of Helsinki. They then went on to spend around $718,000 to build the almost 2,400 square-foot home, which has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.
The couple share the home with their newborn son and three Alaskan Klee Kais, a small Husky-like breed.
Until 2019, they had been going back and forth between Kotka, Dr. Jaakola's hometown, and Turku, a city in Finland's far southwest, where the two had gone to medical school and later did their residencies. In 2017, in preparation for settling down back east, they purchased the lot, carved out of a stretch of coastal forest newly opened to development. Construction started in 2019, and they moved into the finished house in fall 2020.
The couple knew they had the right spot but then all bets were off. "We didn't have any idea what we were doing and didn't really know what we wanted," says Dr. Koskinen, who admits that the most the two could come up with was a loose but contradictory wish for something "traditional but very modern."
After surfing the internet, they found the young Finnish architecture studio of Pirinen & Salo, based in Helsinki and Finland's far north. The architects were able to help them realize their goal by spatially dividing the home into three A-frame wings. In the center, there is a sophisticated, open-plan great room, with furniture by Nordic designers, sleek concrete flooring and a soaring shoreline view. The cabinlike side wings have bedrooms with rustic trappings, including spruce floors.
Wood is the Nordic countries' great natural resource, and it forms the basis of the project. With sustainability goals in mind, the architects used Finnish-made cross-laminated timber, or CLT, a heavy-duty wood product, to frame the building, in place of less expensive, regular wood or more expensive concrete, both of which may incorporate plastic additives. "CLT is considered the really green option," says architect Lauri Salo. It was also substantially faster, allowing the couple to erect the house in a week, rather than the month or more needed for the other materials. At about $228,000, it was also one of the budget's largest items. Exposed CLT-surfaces, which are also spruce, are used for paneling in the bedrooms.
For their $8,700 deck, the couple found a green solution in neighboring Sweden, where a decade-old Stockholm company called OrganoWood has devised a way to impregnate pine with silicates. The final product mimics the resiliency of tropical hardwood, whose popularity in homes has served to deplete rainforests. The process also does away with the need for heavy-metal additives, which are typically used to render ordinary deck wood more durable but can leak out into the environment. Over time, the silicates help give the weathered surface a more uniform tone.
For the unusual black-wood cladding, the architects looked across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia, where a young firm has specialized in its own version of shou sugi ban, the Japanese art of preserving wood through charring. The result, which cost around $27,000, is an iridescent black surface that is stylish as well as sturdy.
At first, the plan was to have a dark roof match the cladding, but Mr. Salo was worried that might turn the house into "a black blob." Then he found a solution during a bike ride in the Finnish countryside, he says, when he saw old buildings whose roofs had rusted a pale shade of green. The light-green eaves, which cost about $23,000, are steeper than usual, helping keep the roof clear of snow in the winter, while the light color reflects heat in summer, he says. The house has two high-tech pumps for underfloor heating and vent-based air conditioning, at a cost of almost $33,000.
According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the number of hot days in the area -- regarded in this climate as above 77 degrees Fahrenheit -- has increased significantly over the past several decades. And while overall snowfall is down, due to winter starting later, individual local snow storms can be more intense. Dr. Koskinen says he is noticing more intense storms year-round.
Mikael Hilden, a specialist in natural-resource management who heads up the climate-change program at the Finnish Environment Institute in Helsinki, says Finnish homeowners are responding to overall warmer summers by relying on pump technology for cooling, with sales soaring in recent years. Mr. Salo says his residential clients now automatically want air conditioning in their new homes -- a stark change from as recently as five years ago.
From the start, the couple wanted to combine the year-round and vacation housing types in one structure, which meant staying mindful of harsh winters, when nighttime temperatures can get down as low as minus 25 Fahrenheit, and light-filled summers, when highs can reach into the 90s. They spent close to $50,000 on their winter-friendly windows and doors, but their architects suspended the central great room on stilts, giving the home a vacation-house look. The stilted effect also creates an ideal outdoor storage space for family canoes. The dual function didn't add to the overall cost, says Mr. Salo.
Dr. Jaakola says the "more linear, minimalist" design in the great room was planned to emphasize multiseasonal use, while softer materials and wood surfaces in the bedrooms play up the summerhouse feel. As it turned out, she says, "it's actually very refreshing to move between these different spaces" throughout the year. She says the around $2,100 grill has become "the centerpiece" of the home's dual function, serving as a normal grill on sunny summer nights and an outdoor hearth in the dark of winter.
According to Marju Silander, executive director of the Finnish Homeowners' Association, just under half of the country currently has access to a vacation house, though these still tend to be mid-to-late-20th-century cabins, often without heating or insulation. She says the couple's desire to combine functions reflects a prepandemic Finnish trend of upgrading old-fashioned summer houses into more comfortable, year-round second homes. While the couple's plan predates the pandemic itself, it has anticipated Finns' Covid response, says Ms Silander. She says towns are starting to make provisions for homeowners to overlap permanent and second-home usage for a future marked by virtual commuting.
The couple's village, with a year-round population of 5,118, is slumbery for much of the year, but gets lively in July and August, when a nearby restaurant attracts a steady stream of seasonal visitors, and the number of residents exceeds 8,000. The architects responded by closing off the front of the house. Nearly all windows face the water, and a fully integrated garage presents a fortresslike face to passing street traffic. The great room's oversize sea-facing window comes without blinds or shades, but the couple don't mind occasional sea traffic, in the form of summer boats and winter snowmobiles.
Mr. Salo and his partner Teemu Pirinen gave the open kitchen area, equipped with German and Swedish appliances, a special low-lying alcove with the dogs' meals in mind. And they conceived of the second sleeping wing, which has two bedrooms and a utility room, as suitable for children. For a time, the couple used the bedrooms for everything from pandemic-era workouts to a spot for playing the piano. Now that they have reached the parenting stage, with their son's arrival earlier this year, some 16 months after moving in, it's become the children's wing.
Most new garages in Finland are detached, but Dr. Koskinen says their spacious, connected garage helps with an everyday life now marked by balancing parenthood with pet ownership. Dr. Jaakola is enjoying her maternity leave in a home flooded with natural winter scenery -- which, despite hotter summers, can still mean scenic snow cover for up to four months each year. And Dr. Koskinen says he is looking ahead to "cool interior solutions" to his growing son's bedroom, whose own A-frame has a 16-foot ceiling that can accommodate a climbing wall.
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WITH THE GRAIN
More and more homeowners are turning to ordinary wood, relying on the environmentally friendly material for style, substance and a dash of luxury.
The first wave of sustainable architecture, starting in the late 20th century, was concerned with energy consumption, says Uli Dangel, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. But now that many homes have highly effective insulation and more efficient ways to heat and cool, the emphasis has moved on to concerns about the carbon footprint of preparing, using and disposing of building materials. Wood -- which stores carbon, and can be recycled -- is the winner, hands down, he says, with steel and concrete losing out.
Wood is not only better for the environment, but better for the eye, says Utah architect Chris Price, who specializes in energy-efficient residential projects in the booming Park City market. In 2019, Mr. Price, founder of the Klima Architecture studio, designed a 5,100-square-foot solar-powered Park City five-bedroom, built to passive-house standards, at a cost of $2.3 million. For the interiors, the project uses light-stained oak floors with high-performance wood paneling. On the outside cladding, Mr. Price relied again on modified, high-performance wood, this time with a charred-wood finish. His source was the Austin-based company, Delta Millworks, which specializes in sustainable cladding and decking.
Robbie Davis, Delta's owner, says environmentally-friendly ways of enhancing softer woods are leading to results that have the benefits of hardwood. Delta can create color-customized finishes, he says, at a cost of up to $20 per square foot.
Elsewhere in Austin, Prof. Dangel and his wife, Tamie Glass, achieved eye-catching results in the wood surfaces of their own house. He chose longleaf pine planks pre-treated with alcohol -- "to pop" the grain, he says -- and then cured with environmentally-friendly oil. In the primary bedroom, the floors and wood beams may still look like wood, but have the opulence of marble." [1]
1. MANSION --- Great Adaptations --- In Southeast Finland, where winters are getting shorter but stormier and summers longer and hotter, a couple used sustainable materials to construct a house that's livable through the rough seasons
Marcus, J S.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 15 Apr 2022: M.1.
