House Ulve / Lassila Hirvilammi

Architects: Lassila Hirvilammi Architects
Location: Seinäjoki, Finland
Architects in Charge: Anssi Lassila, Teemu Hirvilammi
Project Area: 300 sqm
Project Year: 2004-2008
Photographs: Courtesy of Lassila Hirvilammi

House Ulve is a private house in the old rural district of Seinäjoki, Finland. It is designed to supplement the small scale housing area from the 1950s. The design task was to plan a relatively large house for this area.

The typological starting point chosen as the solution was to combine two houses together by their corners as one functional unit. The public quarters — living room, dining room and kitchen — are set in a high space on the street side of the house, and the bedrooms and other auxiliary spaces are located in the second part on two floors. The scale of the house varies according to its use.

House Ulve is also a mixture of two relatively close cultures. It is a combination of Norwegian and Finnish methods of building houses and living in with a close connection to surrounding nature.

The house is heated by geotherm, which is planned to work together with the directions of the sun. The main materials are blueberry-tinted stained wood with a translucent finish and a zinced tin roof. Special attention was paid to the selected materials and surface treatments for the building in order to build a ‘‘healthy house’’. The main inner material is spruce, sawed towards the centre of the log, what is used in many different forms designed especially for this house. “We believe in small scale tasks for finding new solutions and perspectives to ordinary.”