Building a Rainbow - part 4

Finland on arrival was not a disappointment. It was all that one expects from a Scandinavian country - both spotlessly clean and unobtrusively hi-tech from the time we set foot in the airport building.
Once we had passed through the urban conglomeration of Helsinki, the first thing that struck us, apart from the acres and acres of dark forest, was the SPACE - everything was so spread out. Finland is the seventh largest country in Europe and with only a little over 5 million Finns, there is no shortage of personal space. We were hardly crowded in our area of France, with mile upon mile of open country, but houses in medieval French villages are tightly huddled together and it soon became obvious that your average Finn prefers to live in isolation in a clearing in the forest rather than in a close village community. In fact we were later to learn that it is quite common to clear a space in the forest and then use the timber felled to build your house. In times gone by the French must have felt that there was safety in numbers, not to mention stone fortifications whereas the Finns found it easier to hide in the forest.
We had come to see wooden houses. No problem with that, they were everywhere we looked. Like rainbows of color lining the streets in the small towns, houses in yellow, green and blue mingled with the traditional dark, ox-blood red. We had read that eighty percent of houses in Finland are built of wood and despite there also being a huge export market for their timber, the forests are so well-managed that they are actually still increasing in size. The ecological appeal of this was undeniable. As a building material Finnish wood is hard to beat - grown in their cold, arctic climate it is far more dense and hard as iron compared with wood grown in more temperate latitudes such as ours.
The factory when we finally reached it, was family run, friendly, efficient and on a pleasingly human scale. The resinous pine smell of the hundreds of logs in various stages of production was enticing and the long lengths of pale wood incredibly tactile; irresistibly drawing me to run a hand down their smooth surfaces. Bill, the friendly Brit. who worked there and to whom we had spoken on the telephone, met us in the nearest town to escort us to the factory for a meeting with the owner and also to show us inside a couple of houses that were in the process of construction. The Company had also arranged for us to stay in an apartment they owned in the town. This was not so much a high pressure sales ploy as a necessity due to their remote location.
Looking inside the houses under construction, there were all manner of differences from construction methods with which we were more familiar, one rather amusing one being the difference in size of such a basic thing as a door frame. You would think door sizes would be fairly standard across Europe but no, it soon became obvious that the average Finn is built like a New Zealand rugby player and therefore somewhat larger than the average southern European. Door frames were sized accordingly – at least one and a half times the size of what we were used to. We spent the next few days attempting to draw up more and more far-fetched hypotheses to account for this, along the lines of the one I have always favored to explain the unusual height of most Dutchmen – the theory being that as the Dutch tend to be both very thrifty people and great biking enthusiasts, Dutch kids are usually given bikes that are way too big for them and their legs have to stretch to reach the pedals.
It was a successful trip, both from a business and a personal perspective. We struck a good deal on our house, the weather unusually for Finland was fantastic and furthermore we came away with the prospect of working for the Company as agents for the sale of their houses in France. A potential commitment that we knew we would enjoy as it was a product in which we sincerely believed and something which we also hoped could prove moderately lucrative in the years to come. Our own house would become a showplace and the two small ones we were later planning to build on the site, could operate on a ‘try before you buy’ principal as well as being holiday rentals. It looked to be an exciting year ahead full of hope and we were buoyed up with enthusiasm.
We made the most of our remaining three days after the meetings were over and traveled as far as we could in the time, greedy to experience the vast areas of lakeland. Those hot, lazy days were filled with visions of a countryside rich with huge expanses of forest, roads lined with ribbons of pink and purple lupins, flat horizons and mile after mile of vistas where the distinction between sky and dark water was distorted by reflections of deep clear blue punctuated only by the cotton-wool puffs of the odd white cloud.
The time went all too quickly but having achieved what we came for and fired up by all the discussions and thoughts of our beautiful new house, we were not sorry to return and keen to get to work on putting our plans into effect.