Kotkansiipi

Kotkansiipi started after my wife and I attended the annual Finnish housing show in Tuusala, Finland in 1999. We fell in love with a house at the show and contacted SAFA https://www.safa.fi/eng/ which is officially the Suomen Arkkitehtiliitto or Finnish Architect Society. They put us in touch with Pet Michael who was the designer of the home. Pet has designed home for many famous Finns including former F1 driver Mika Salo.

In typical fashion, we arranged to meet Pet and his girlfriend at the main train station in Helsinki. Pet designed our home which is similar to the model home in Tuusala built for Lammi Betoni to showcase their concrete designs and possibilities.

What you see is an adaptation of the Finnish design to American styling and standards. The original home has a detached garage and no basement. We tried to keep as many styling queues as possible but there were budget constraints. We originally planned to build the home with auto-claved bricks, then switched to pre-poured walls but ran into delivery problems due to all of the logistic's centers being built in the area at the time.

The house was contracted by Joe Edmeier. The stucco and wood flooring were completed by a Russian crew that did amazing work. My wife Tamara did all of the tile work. She learned this while working for Teppo Kartunen, a building contractor from Lappeenranta, Finland and a mean rally driver I might add. The house took 9 months to complete.