New "granny cottages" being sold to meet pensioners' dreams of a return to country life

Entrepreneur notes there are a lot of grannies out there, and more and more on the way

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By Minna Nalbantoglu in Luopioinen
     
      A small cottage, painted in the familiar red-earth colours and with smart white window frames, stands on the edge of a forest.
      The yard is currently hidden under drifts of snow, but in the summer it is a handsome sight, the owner declares.
      Olavi Mäkinen and his wife Eila have been living here in Luopioinen, south-east from Tampere, in this newly-built "granny cottage" for the past eighteen months.
      The one-storey house, with a floor area of around 60 square metres, has a large parlour-cum-kitchen and a bedroom downstairs, plus the usual bathroom and WC, and there is another area suitable for sleeping in the attic space.
     
The little home is the result of Luopioinen's "New Age Granny Cottage" project, which was launched by local resident Ari Toivari in collaboration with his architect brother Pertti Toivari.
      The basic idea is to sell new cottages like this one on a retro nostalgia platform and to meet the dreams of new pensioners of a move back to the country and a quieter way of life.
     
In Karjalohja, west of Lohja and the capital (see map), a development of 29 such houses is scheduled to go up. Luopioinen has included in its master plan a possibility to build a total of fifteen little homes on the same area as the Mäkinen house.
      In addition, the manufacturer of ready-built homes Kastelli sells dozens of its free-time villas under the "granny cottage" label each year, in different sizes up to 106 m²: they have become the company's most popular second-home model.
     
Nostalgia clearly plays a part. "The next generation are still enchanted by the peace and quiet of the countryside and by the model of the old cottage they remember from their childhood and visiting the grandparents, but the old place itself has seen better days, and what they want now is something new and with all mod cons thrown in", explains Matti Heikinheimo from Kastelli's holiday homes unit.
      The Kastelli designs are intended for year-round leisure use and not simply as summer cottages, and the houses in Karjalohja and Luopioinen are not strictly speaking cottages at all, but permanent residences.
     
There are of course also demographic issues at work in all this.
      Some are putting their money on the idea that a share of the baby-boomer generation now approaching retirement age in large numbers will wish to leave the cities for the rural idyll when they give up work.
      According to a questionnaire carried out by Vaasa University in 2002, this is exactly what 16% of those living in the largest cities and born between 1940 and 1950 do intend to do.
      The great majority of them would not be travelling far, but would relocate to the countryside close to one of the present growth centres.
     
"There are a lot of grannies about, and there are more and more coming all the time", says Seppo Syvähuoko, who is heading the Karjalohja cottage village project. "We already have fifteen takers lined up."
      The order for the houses has been signed and the first residents are scheduled to move in this autumn.
     
The cottages in Luopioinen are not actually intended specifically for pensioners alone. The idea of the Toivari brothers was to create inexpensive compact homes on small plots of land.
      They also suit well to energy-saving efforts brought by fears of climate change.
      "It seemed crazy to us that while families are getting progressively smaller, houses are just growing and growing", says Ari Toivari.
     
As it turns out, the original size of the "granny cottages" that these were based on proved to be too small for modern users.
      The houses that have gone up have sometimes been criticised as rather too big to bear the old name, despite its obvious retro selling-point.
      The brothers Toivari also noticed that price did not seem to be any great obstacle.
      The houses that have been completed in Luopioinen cost around EUR 150,000, while those in Karjalohja will go for between 20,000 and 40,000 euros more. The houses in Karjalohja are slightly larger, at 70-90 m².
     
Olavi and Eila Mäkinen moved into their new home from a much larger house - around 200 square metres - not far away. Both have worked in the cities during their active careers, but they returned to the country when they retired.
      They wanted a smaller home because looking after a big place and a garden of similar scale proved too much like hard work.
      They can find nothing negative to say about their new home in Luopioinen.
      "No need to move anywhere from here unless it's six feet under", says Olavi Mäkinen, 72.
      "And the graveyard isn't a long hike away, either", he adds with a grin.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 16.2.2008


Links:
  Kastelli ready-built homes (in Finnish)

MINNA NALBANTOGLU / Helsingin Sanomat
minna.nalbantoglu@hs.fi