Villa Mairea

Villa Mairea is a villa, guest-house, and rural retreat designed and built by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto for Harry and Maire Gullichsen in Noormarkku, Finland. The building was constructed in 1938–1939.

The Gullichsens were a wealthy couple and members of the Ahlström family. They told Aalto that he should regard it as 'an experimental house'. Aalto seems to have treated the house as an opportunity to bring together all the themes that had been preoccupying him in his work to that point but had not been able to include them in actual buildings.

Today, Villa Mairea is considered one of the most important buildings Aalto designed in his career.

The plan of the Villa Mairea is a modified L-shape of the kind Aalto had used before. It is a layout which automatically created a semi-private enclosure to one side, and a more exclusive, formal edge to confront the public world on the other. The lawn and the swimming pool are situated in the angle of the L, with a variety of rooms overlooking them. Horizontals and overhangs in the main composition echo the ground plane, and the curved pool weds the nearby forest topography. In contrast to these softening devices, the main facade has a more rigid, formal mood, and even possesses a canopy restated in a garden pergola vocabulary of bindings, poles and slats. The interiors of the Villa Mairea are richly articulated in wood, stone and brick. The spaces vary in size from the grand to the cabin-like.

The Villa Mairea was designed for Harry and Maire Gullichsen, to whom Aalto was introduced in 1935, by Nils-Gustav Hahl. Hahl was keen to promote his bentwood furniture designs. Maire, after whom the house was named, was the daughter of Walter Ahlström, of the Timber and Paper Company. She studied painting in Paris during the early 1920s, and in 1928, married the businessman Harry Gullichsen, who four years later became managing director of the A. Ahlström Company. Maire and Hahl had the idea of founding an avant-garde art gallery in Helsinki to act as a focus of progressive culture, and in due course this became ‘ARTEK’, now world-famous as manufacturers and distributors of Aalto’s furniture and glassware.

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