Villa Mairea

The Villa Mairea Foundation, which owns and runs the house, credits it as designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto, with the interior the responsibility of Aino Aalto. It was built in 1938–39 for Maire and Harry Gullichsen — Maire was a painter, an Ahlström heiress and, with the Aaltos and Nils-Gustav Hahl, a founder of Artek — who asked for an experimental house and got one. The plan is a modified L with the lawn, the curved pool and the sauna wing set in its angle; the main façade keeps a rigid, formal mood, and its entrance canopy is restated in the garden pergola in a vocabulary of bindings, poles and slats. Inside, wood, brick and stone are laid against one another in rooms that change scale from grand to cabin-like without a break. Almost every theme Aalto had been circling since 1933 arrives here at once. It was inscribed on the World Heritage List with twelve other Aalto works in July 2026.