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Villa Mairea is a villa, guest-house and rural retreat built by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto...

Villa Mairea is a villa, guest-house and rural retreat built by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto for Harry and Maire Gullichsen in Noormarkku, Finland. The Gullichsens were a wealthy couple and members of the Ahlström — Gullichsen family. They told Aalto that he should regard it as 'an experimental house'. Aalto seems to have treated the house as an opportunity to bring together all the themes that had been preoccupying him in his work to that point but had not been able to include them in actual buildings. The plan of the Villa Mairea is a modified L-shape of the kind Aalto had used before. It is a layout which automatically created a semi-private enclosure to one side, and a more exclusive, formal edge to confront the public world on the other. The lawn and the swimming pool are situated in the angle of the L, with a variety of rooms overlooking them. Horizontals and overhangs in the main composition echo the ground plane, and the curved pool weds the nearby forest topography. In contrast to these softening devices, the main facade has a more rigid, formal mood, and even possesses a canopy restated in a garden pergola vocabulary of bindings, poles and slats. The interiors of the