Modern art and the atmosphere of the 60’s meet in a terraced house in Helsinki

Residents:

Tuuli Kousa (Chief Communications and Corporate Responsibility Officer at OP Financial Group, Board Member at Finnish National Opera and Ballet, and Chair at Dance House Helsinki) and her boys Kaapo and Arne. Their home is a 147 m2 apartment in a terraced house, in Oulunkylä, Helsinki, designed by architect Olavi Kantele in the 1960s.

Tuuli Kousa

The fact that each item has some specific meaning to her makes them permanent. The same applies to other items Tuuli owns: she doesn’t change her interior decor to suit any passing trends.

BEHIND THE TREES, you can see a futuristic terraced house from the 1960s in Oulunkylä, Helsinki. The facade is covered in profiled white steel plates, contrasting with the black windows frames. The colors and the alternation of horizontal and vertical lines underline the building’s graphic nature.

The black-and-white theme continues in the interior her home – but only in terms of the architecture. Colorful modern art brings plenty of other tones into the apartment. As opposed to the family's previous homes, there are relatively few colorful elements in the interior design, and the walls have been painted white.

“Before we moved in, the apartment had been rented ever since it was built. That's why nothing major has been changed and many of the original details are still here. Many of the surfaces were nevertheless in such a bad shape that we had to renovate the place from top to bottom,” says Tuuli Kousa.

It was obvious to her right from the start that the renovation would be carried out respecting the original era and, if feasible, restoring as much as possible.

THE FAMILY MOVED to the apartment in the autumn of 2017. The three-story building on a hillside had been owned up to the 2000s by the builder’s family. The builder and his heirs had respected the spirit of the building and thanks to them residents still ran a ‘spare parts shop’ of original materials, which is where Tuuli also found some 1960s tiles for the wall between the kitchen counter and cabinets.

In her previous homes, Tuuli used plenty of colors on the walls. As a black-and-white theme was one of the architect’s key ideas, they had to find the right shade of white for the walls. Tuuli phoned Tikkurila’s paint experts, listened for half an hour to their analysis of different whites and ended up choosing a shade called Paper. It was the perfect choice for their apartment.

However, Tuuli doesn’t want to be too puritanical. “I want to give space to architecture but not live in the museum.”