You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading.The Happiest Little House of HorrorsWelcome to the Spruce House in Finland, where macabre jokes about the end of the world are built into a comfortable island cabin.NewJan-Erik Andersson and Marjo Malin at the Spruce House in Turku, Finland. “This house is really about symbols, what art can do, and what houses should be,” Mr. Andersson said.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesSept. 30, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ETA metal pool ladder is fixed to a wooden veranda outside Jan-Erik Andersson’s house in western Finland. But there is no pool here, and we are 1,000 feet from the sea. The steps to nowhere, says Mr. Andersson, are a provocation, “an artwork to protest about rising waters.”“We are waiting for our pool,” he adds. “It will not be long. The world is burning.”More unsettling visual jokes about imminent environmental catastrophe turn up all over his hexagonal home, known as the Spruce House. But Mr. Andersson, an artist, designer and performer, can’t help but envelop them in the beauty that he sees all around the natural world. He’s an optimist, after all.Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesVesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThe Spruce House, newly built on a semirural plot on the island of Hirvensalo, in Finland’s Turku archipelago, resembles a wicked-green wooden head, perhaps some kind of Nordic folk-horror goblin. Its mossy green roof is a misshapen hat, its scarlet door an abstracted bloody mouth, its narrow windows a pair of malevolent eyes.It is built to high environmental standards, and heated and cooled by geothermal energy, but these technicalities aren’t really what interest its creator. “There are many houses, many architects dealing with purely ecological problems,” he says. “This house is really about symbols, what art can do, and what houses should be. In my opinion, there should be more art interventions.”Mr. Andersson and Ms. Malin in the kitchen. The ‘philosopher’s table,’ an acrylic work by Mr. Andersson, imagines mountains, temples and knowledge systems consumed by flames.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesMr. Andersson, modest and energetic at 70, is a well-known art figure in the Nordics. He moved into the 795-square-foot house this year with his wife, the graphic designer Marjo Malin, having built it to his own design as a postdoctoral project working with the Finnish architect Erkki Pitkäranta. Together, they conceived a visual tension between Mr. Andersson’s eco-optimism and the apocalyptic motifs in the interiors — much of which are Ms. Malin’s work.“She has less faith in humanity’s ability to work together to solve problems and I am more positive, so you get both sides,” Mr. Andersson says.The architect Erkki Pitkäranta, who designed the house with Mr. Andersson, describes his aesthetic as “strict and functional,” whereas his client’s is driven by colors and forms. “Those are very good things to put together.”Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesAfter a few months living the house, Ms. Malin says, “it feels normal, you get used to it.”“It’s also functioning very well, and it feels like home,” she adds. “I think it feels like when you are inside your mother’s womb. It feels like a safe place because it’s little and round.”Perhaps the best way to think of the Spruce House is as a manifesto you can live in. Mr. Pitkäranta describes his architectural point of view as “strict and functional,” whereas his clients come from a world of intentional colors and forms — “and those are very good things to put together.”The name refers to three spruce trees originally on site, which fell prey to parasites and had to be cut down. Those bathetic pool steps are an installation by Trudi Entwistle, the English environmental artist, who also laid out Mr. Andersson’s garden — a series of earth ramps tangled with wild grasses and meadow flowers, suggesting the house’s inhabitants are stranded in a wasted landscape that’s been returned to nature.The staircase is both “the stairway to heaven and the road to hell,” Mr. Andersson says.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesMs. Malin designed many of the interior moitifs.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesDownstairs, there’s a bathroom and an open kitchen/living room anchored by the “philosopher’s table,” a circular acrylic work by Mr. Andersson. Its surface design imagines mountains, ancient temples and knowledge systems consumed by flames. A second, rotating table features violent, swirling digital galaxies flocked with spruce branches. To complete the metaphor, 10 black “burnt” Philippe Starck chairs are positioned neatly around the table.“The doom scenarios have been part of art for centuries, but we are still here,” Mr. Andersson says. “Talk and communication is the only way, and we have 10 chairs around the table for that. And a big monitor beside the table for bringing those discussions online.”Ms. Malin’s designs for the interior include a kitchen backsplash of red Perspex in the shape of cartoonish scarlet flames, reminiscent of the “This is fine” internet meme. “The fire, lots of black and orange, was my idea,” she says. “Then Jan-Erik and I decided together how to use them.”Clusters of lampshades are junk-shop bargains of the mid-20th century, mass-produced variety, a way to find use for old plastics. For fixtures, Ms. Malin improvised with secondhand finds: “I used old egg cups for door handles,” she said.Ms. Malin’s designs in the kitchen include a backsplash of red Perspex in the shape of scarlet flames. “I used old egg cups for door handles,” she says. Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThe staircase, with steps that change from red to orange to yellow to white as one ascends, is “the stairway to heaven and the road to hell,” says Mr. Andersson. “You get hotter as you go down, you come up onto a cloud — symbolically, of course.”Upstairs, there’s a compact bedroom, a shower room and two micro-offices, one each for the couple. Ms. Malin’s desk and shelves are immaculate. “She’s a very minimalist person,” her husband says. His space is only slightly messier and has a balcony overlooking the garden: “It’s a beer-drinking place, only for me and my beer bottle. There’s no room for anyone else.”The house is hexagonal, he says, because “there are no squares in nature.” He borrowed the motif from the rock formations at the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. “Natural forms are good for our psyche. With squares it wouldn’t have the same feeling at all.” Most of the windows are arrow-shaped, with five corners.Not all motifs and artworks are didactic — some are purely decorative, like the five facade sculptures by the Finnish artists Heini Aho and Kimmo Schroderus, among others. They were, Mr. Andersson says, blind commissions; he simply invited artists he admires to make him something, then fastened the results to the exterior in an arrangement that pleased him. “There should be more ornaments,” he says.“We are waiting for our pool,” Mr. Andersson says. “It will not be long. The world is burning.”Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesEvery window in the house has five corners. “There are no squares in nature.”Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesThe Spruce House may be a Finnish curiosity, but it comes from a global tradition of homes known as “Gesamtkunstwerk” — a German term meaning “total artwork,” indicating highly individualistic collisions of architecture and art. Their creators use and live with their work.The Spruce House is Mr. Andersson’s second attempt at such a project. His first was Life on a Leaf, a custard-yellow villa with a wooden facade and crowned with an indigo-glass skylight in the shape of an enormous, upside-down bluebell — “only for philosophizing and drinking in,” he says. The house was a celebration of nature, also designed by Mr. Andersson and Mr. Pitkäranta and completed in 2009 for his doctoral project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. In his 2020 book “Total Design,” professor George H. Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania included Life on a Leaf alongside masterpieces by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Finland’s Alvar Aalto.Life on a Leaf, which sits on the plot next to the Spruce House, was initially funded through philanthropic donations, and as part of a special arrangement it was Mr. Andersson’s home for a while. Now it belongs to a nonprofit organization set up to secure its future, and hosts artists in residence. By contrast, Mr. Andersson paid for the Spruce House himself, with support from the city of Turku, which owns the land, and some funding from the Kone Foundation, an arts sponsor in Finland. The total cost was €250,000 (about $275,000), excluding the external sculptures.Mr. Andersson commissioned other Finnish artists to create the facade sculptures.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesMr. Andersson fastened them to the exterior in an arrangement that pleased him.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesTurku’s planning officials insisted the new house complement Life on a Leaf, effectively prohibiting Mr. Andersson from building anything bland or conventional. “Both buildings are works of art in themselves and contain separate visible artworks to delight people,” says Timo Hintsanen, director of development for the City of Turku. “From a cultural significance perspective, it is important that the complex is as open as possible.”One final structure sits on the site: The sunshine-yellow sauna, shaped like an enormous garlic clove, or perhaps a Russian Orthodox Church dome, with bugle-shaped metal pipes where a stalk should be. This is the Sounding Dome, a fiberglass steamhouse created with the American sound artist Shawn Decker as a public commission in 2011. Today, the sauna is out of order and awaiting repair, but the sound installation still works. Inside are rows of chairs mounted on platforms — secondhand finds with the legs removed.Mr. Andersson closes the door. Through the silence comes a discordant drone, like the low whine of an animal, then a shrill whistle and a gurgle. When the heat rises, the sound becomes louder and more intense — a way to heighten the senses beyond the powers of a standard sauna. “The sound travels around your head,” he says.The sunshine-yellow sauna, shaped like an enormous garlic clove, is the “sounding dome,” a fiberglass steamhouse created with the American sound artist Shawn Decker.Credit...Vesa Laitinen for The New York TimesHow often does he use it? “I am not a big sauna person,” he says. “It takes away your efficiency. I’m a workaholic.”He hopes the Spruce House design may one day be replicated at scale, perhaps as some kind of experimental housing estate. On the way out, we pass two low stools with knobbly, concrete seats on the veranda. Mr. Andersson says he made the stools for philosophizing on.“They are uncomfortable on purpose,” he says, “because we cannot be sure of anything.”

Welcome to the Spruce House in Finland, where macabre jokes about the end of the world are built into a comfortable island cabin.