[Published in World of Interiors, May 2012]
Approaching the evocatively named 'Life on a Leaf' on the outskirts of Turku, Finland, from the road, you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a children's daycare centre. The building, after all, is bright yellow, leaf-shaped and decorated with a frieze of red hearts, blue shovels and green Christmas tree shapes. But first impressions can be misleading, for this eccentric-looking place is in fact a private residence, home to the artist Jan-Erik Andersson and his family, and boasting perhaps the most dynamic domestic interior in Finland.
In 1999, Andersson, feeling himself frustrated with the overly prescriptive nature of mainstream domestic architectural practice, decided to do something about it. The celebrated installation artist had been involved in architecture for some time, having collaborated with the architect Erkki Pitkäranta since 1995. The two had founded an architectural practice together, its name, Rosegarden, referencing their shared passion for architecture inspired by the forms and beauty of nature. Andersson and Pitkäranta couldn't understand the prevailing obsession with abstraction and fear of ornamentation: they wanted to design buildings and interiors that told stories; made people laugh; were art objects in themselves.
The two worked together on several successful projects in the 1990s – a cow shed in the shape of a cumin seed, a horticultural college in the form of a flower, the quirky and colourful interior of an organisation promoting visual arts – but the ultimate challenge for the team came when Andersson decided to design and build a home for his family based on Rosegarden's founding principles.
'Life on a Leaf', the extraordinary house the artist shares with his graphic designer partner Marjo and their seven-year-old son Adrian, took six years in the planning and four years to build, but was worth the wait.
The house is almost entirely open-plan: the bathrooms, Marjo's study and Adrian's bedroom are the only rooms with doors. The ground floor of the three-story building curls around a central wall that separates the kitchen from the house's entrance hall and shelters the wood-burning stove that helps to heat the house. This layout is just one of many callbacks to traditional Finnish house-building, the techniques of which informed the build throughout and also led to the inclusion of practical features such as concave exterior walls topped by deep eaves to minimise rainfall. To the lay observer, however, the leaf house's exterior colour scheme is really the only similarity it shares with the uniformly traditional and conservative buildings that surround it in Turku and in Finland in general. When it comes to imaginative house-building in this part of the world, Andersson and Pitkäranta are on their own.
One of the artist's favourite places in the house is the kitchen-diner, with its psychedelic worktop design, two-tone colour plan and motley collection of dining chairs. The teardrop-shaped window over the sink was inspired by a six-month spell living in Kilburn, north-west London in the 1980s, where Andersson first encountered windows in the kitchen and bathrooms of houses, features practically unheard of in Finland. It is an aspect of the house that continues to delight him.
The work surface was designed by media artist Karin Andersen, who, along with almost two dozen other artists, was invited to contribute a piece of work that would become part of the very fabric of the house. Andersson gave these artistic collaborators, all of them friends, free rein when it came to the commissions, but insisted that the works should be conceived independently of the house itself. “They got strict orders not to try to fit things in, because I don't like art that fits too neatly. It should create some tension”, explains Andersson.
Andersen's kitchen worktop, Andersson says, “is extraordinary because you are working there and she is there too, in a way. You are communicating with her. It's one of the greatest feelings to work on this surface and look out the teardrop-shaped window. This space is also very interesting because it makes you want to dance. Adrian, my son, does a lot of dance performances there”.
Elsewhere, the commissioned pieces, from sound installations to textile designs to relief work in concrete, guide the house's interior design, with Andersson drawing on his own colourful, sculptural artistic practice to fill in the gaps. The collaborative aspect of 'Life on a Leaf' has been crucial to the success of the project, the artist says. “I don't want to live in my own head and neither do my family so in that way it's very good to have a sense of Erriki [Pitkäranta] being there too, along with those other artists.”
The result of this approach is an extraordinary jumble of styles, colours and textures. Noticeable, however, is the paucity of objects in the house. Aside from the collection of leaf-shaped bowls decorating the coffee table – many of them gifts from British environmental artist Trudi Entwistle, who created installations in the area surrounding the house – and a few books and records, 'Life on a Leaf' is remarkably bare. “It's a maximalist house for a minimalist way of life”, explains Andersson, pointing out that it is Marjo, with her fondness for minimalism, who has championed this particular compromise. “It's just down to what we really need. We've stripped off everything else to be able to create this new mental space.”
Because, ultimately, this is a house designed for living. The art works that make it up may be ornate and beautiful but they do not interfere with the normal business of sleeping, eating, playing and working that goes on here. That, in fact, is partly the point Andersson was trying to make by building this house in the first place. There's no reason why art cannot be experienced as part of daily life, he believes, and therefore no reason why it shouldn't play a role in architecture too.
When Andersson first put together the plans for the house in 1999, a professor of architecture took one look at the model and told Andersson that he would never be happy there. This is a picture, not a house, the academic said, and you can't live in a picture. It's two years since Andersson, Marjo and Adrian moved into 'Life on a Leaf' and all three are still discovering new perspectives on their extraordinary home. Life there, says Andersson, is “better than we would have believed”. It turns out that you can live in a picture after all.
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