Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland, 1939

Date:March 19, 2014

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Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland, 1939

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 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.

Aalto began work on the Villa towards the end of 1937, and was given an almost free hand by his clients. His first proposal was a rustic hut modeled on vernacular farmhouses. Early in 1938, however, inspiration came from a radically different source, the residence named ‘Fallingwater’ designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, which had just received international acclaim thanks to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and publication in Life and Time magazines, as well as in architectural journals. Such was Aalto’s enthusiasm for the design, Schildt tells us, that he tried to persuade the Gullichsens to build their home over a stream on Ahlström land a few miles out of Noormarkku. (“Villa Mairea” 2017)