Sometimes I do wonder this industry. It seems that our industry exists just because of a freak accident. I am talking about log home industry from Finnish point of view.
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Our country is relatively large when compared to population. This means that we have lots and lots of forests. Finland’s location on northern hemisphere gives us lots of pine and fir tree forests. Accidentally these trees, especially pines, make excellent log cabin home raw material. Hence we have abundant supply of log home building material.
FURTHER HISTORY
This is the basic setting. From historic point of view, log homes and log cabins were very popular in Finland until rebuilding efforts after the Second World War. We had to move masses of people away from Carelia, an area taken by Soviet Union (nowadays Russia). To accommodate so many people, in such a sort time was hectic operation. Problems arose from these people having no land, and therefore they had no access on timber. Logs are difficult to transport over distances, unlike saw-processed timber. This resulted into increasing timber frame building.
CLOSER HISTORY
Another historic milestone was the demographic change and urbanization of Finland. People moved to cities from countryside and single-home houses turned into apartment blocks, no timber used at all. Log home building nearly vanished but there was a savior in form of recreational log cabin building.
WAY OF LIFE
You might have heard Finland to be referred as a country of thousands of lakes. All those urbanized people wanted to have a summer cottage by lake. Log cabins came to rescue. Log structure is very solid and can withstand dry, cold and unused winters as well as humid, hot and active summers. Logs also played an important role in bringing some nostalgic atmosphere for this idyllic log home living. Making log cabins provided jobs to countryside, lumber was acquired and cabins built locally. Soon Finland was full of tiny father and son operated log cabin companies. Some of these companies managed to grow.
INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
Markets in Finland are tiny and soon biggest log cabin rush was over. Some companies had managed to build their operations to industrial level so that machinery was largely used in milling the logs instead of handcrafting. These companies worked hard to build nationwide brands and many of them managed to do this. Among these companies we got our first log home and log cabin exporters. Today Finland boasts with the world’s biggest industrial log home manufacturer Honka and several others that are somewhat smaller.
EXPORTS
Exports of Finnish log homes started with nearby area deliveries – Sweden and rest of the Scandinavia, Russia and Germany. These areas still form bulk of Finnish log cabin and log home exports. True jackpot came from Japanese markets. Finnish log home companies have been able to sell cabins to Japan by thousands. Apparently there is something in Finnish log cabin design that pleases Japanese aesthetics. The look of Finnish log cabin as well as log home is very clean and streamlined, there is something very “Scandinavian design” in them. One reason for this is that once our log home companies had filled the original market demand for rustic log cabin homes, they had to expand their product slate and offer log homes that fit into suburban setting.
FUTURE
Finnish log homes have not had much success on American soil, because of the lack of rustic feeling. Honka has been trying to educate U.S. homebuyers, but with relatively modest results. More and more Finnish companies are adapting to foreign markets, because tough domestic competition has improved their quality and design. I believe that in the future, Finland will have couple of log home industry giants.