Project Ö

Reached by a twenty-minute boat ride from the coastal village of Kasnäs, past countless islands both deserted and dotted with colourful houses, Project Ö sits on Skjulskäret, a secluded two-hectare private island in the south-west of the Finnish archipelago, its southern half covered in pine and three glacier-carved rock fingers reaching north into the Baltic Sea, with a small sheltered beach, several campfire sites for any wind direction, and a wood-heated rock pool for warming up after a swim in the cold sea.

Designed by the island's owners, Aleksi Hautamäki and Milla Selkimäki, and completed in 2018, Project Ö is an ensemble of three timber buildings that follow the contours of the island, their pitched roofs, long gutters, and wooden panelling paying homage to traditional Finnish construction and the local forests, combined with a Japanese minimalism most evident in the compact main house, where a south-facing living room and black-stained birchwood kitchen open to a large tunnel stove and a seating area, with two double bedrooms (one on the ground floor, one on a mezzanine with a view of the sky), an outdoor kitchen for grilling and smoking fish, a sauna, a separate log workshop for craft projects, and a glass dining pavilion set a short walk through the forest, powered self-sufficiently by photovoltaics in summer.