HS Vantaa | “What they have done” – The former owner of the hundred-year-old house was shocked when he saw the current state

In Birkuhaa On Kuririiti, surrounded by modern wooden houses, stands a house that doesn’t seem to belong in the crowd. Higher than the others, it looks down on the new wooden houses as if to say I was here before you.

And so it turned out to be true.

The yellow wooden house, the main building of Bokulla farm, has stood on the rock for over a hundred years. The new wooden houses surrounding it have only been in place for a few months.

But, as so often in today’s world, old age is not valued. Even the smallest of the new luhti houses around the house were sold for many times the price compared to the main building.

A twenty-square-meter studio apartment was available for 139,000 euros. Bokulla’s main building, on the other hand, will be sold at auction. On Thursday evening, the highest offer for a 260-square-meter house was a measly 37,000 euros.

Bokullaa commercial director of the selling Puukoti Group Antti Seppinen says that there is a reason for the low price.

“The house has a lot of repair debt. It also has oil heating, so I think the heating method needs to be renewed, as well as the pipes and electricity.”

The roof of the house also needs to be repaired, and a complete surface repair should also be done.

“In other words, to put it nicely: the exterior is in pretty good shape, and the house has a log frame.”

The price is also pulled down by the fact that around the main building there is only a small yard of a little more than a hundred square meters.

It was a time when the main building was surrounded by 14 hectares of its own land. Next to the house was a huge utility garden with apples and grape and gooseberry bushes. Beets, peas and grain were cultivated in the field. Large deciduous trees hummed all around.

The last owner and resident of the main building Per-Johan Bäckström remember this time well.

“I was born in a summer workplace,” he says.

“My summer job was picking produce from the garden to sell at the market.”

Born in 1951, Bäckström has lived in the house for a large part of his life, until last year, when Bäckström and his siblings sold the house and the surrounding land to the Puukoti Group.

“There were no successors, and future renovations would have required considerable sums of money. The running costs of the house were high, the property tax alone was 6,000 euros per year.”

The main building was built by Bäckström’s paternal grandfather in 1919. There used to be a public school on the same hill, which had burned down.

“Eno had no children, so he sold the house to my father after the wars.”

Before Eno sold the house to Bäckström’s father, the building served as a children’s home for a while. The house’s past as a children’s home also came to the fore when the main building was put up for sale, because a potential buyer interested in the house knew that his father had been in that children’s home.

Bokulla farm was at its peak in the 1960s. After that it started to shrink. The last cows left in 1964 and the chickens at the end of the same decade.

Land was gradually sold more and less voluntarily to the city of Vantaa.

“In the end, there was only one hectare left,” says Bäckström.

The Bäckströms kept this hectare to themselves until the end. It housed, among other things, an old barn, a litter box, a shed, an outdoor sauna and a small 18th-century cottage. The cabin was built for farm workers. Bäckström lived in the main building with his family and his mother.

Now, 78 apartments and a common courtyard sauna have been built in place of the outbuildings.

Although Bäckström sold the house and plot knowing that they would be built on, the end result has still been a surprise. When Bäckström drove past Bokulla a couple of months after the sale, the sight that opened up ahead was breathtaking.

“I had to pull over to the bus stop and take a deep breath. What have they done, I thought. All the trees had been cut down. That would be fine. A drop caught my eye.”

Bäckström knew how to expect that every square would be fully built, but the felling of all the trees came as a surprise. After all, he had given the developer a long speech in which he explained that there was no need to cut down the trees. And as a biologist and arborist, he knew what he was talking about.

“In countries with more traditions, trees are cherished. Finland is lagging behind in this matter. Here, everything is smoothed out and a couple of meters of sticks are planted instead.”

Bäckström’s mood was not lifted when he heard last week that the house was for sale at a ridiculous price.

“It’s hard to get it sold now for a decent price when it has a big renovation ahead of it, no yard and neighboring houses twenty meters away.”

Wooden house The Group hopes that a buyer will be found for the main building who will start the renovation as soon as possible, so that the building does not fall into further disrepair.

“We don’t want any of the infamous Linnunlaulu villa, which has been repaired for 50 years using traditional methods,” says Seppinen.

Read more: Helsinki found new signs of dilapidation in Linnunlaulu’s villa

Bokulla is not protected, but it is considered to be a locally valuable architectural heritage site.

Bäckström also hopes that a buyer will be found. The worst option would be if no one bought the house, because that would be a death blow for it.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was allowed to rot in its place and then the city already got a demolition permit. That’s how you get rid of many old buildings.”