Finland’s state-owned wood house is being touted as a sustainable alternative to traditional, industrial-sized homes.
The house in Kalevala, north-west of Helsinki, was recently featured in a new documentary, Finnish Wood House: Up Home, which highlights the Finnish wood industry and the challenges faced by the industry.
In Finland, the traditional woodhouse is used as a shelter for the homeless, and the state-run woodhouse company Sorenta is providing a shelter with a roof to a number of the local homeless.
The film was shot on the Sorensa woodhouse site, in Kalesvität, north of Helsinki.
It was filmed in April, when the Finnish Woodhouse Company was making a presentation to the city council about the benefits of using wood for homes.
Director Rolf Eriksson said the documentary showed the importance of wood as a building material.
“It is also a great material for the environment.
We see how the wood is used for construction, the way it is processed, how it is finished, and how it can be recycled.”
Finland is a country of a lot of different landscapes.
In our forest there is a lot that you can see,” Erikssen said.
The story of how Finland became the world’s first woodhouse nation was told in the documentary, which is part of a series on wood used for buildings.
The documentary also looked at how the local wood industry has expanded and become more sustainable in the past decade.”
In the beginning we were only a little bit of a producer,” said Sorenda owner Juha Pääsänen.”
But we were very good producers and managed to keep our businesses up and growing,” he said.
Päässänen has been working with the local government since the late 1990s and has invested a lot in the wood industry.”
I am sure that in five years we will have some good things to say about our history, about our business,” he added.
