In Mattila’s Instagram posts, I’ve shared all sorts of stories behind the names of the guest rooms. I don’t even know the origins of all the names—and for some, I’ve heard different versions that don’t quite agree with one another.

For this very reason, I ended up having an interesting exchange with my aunt Sirpa, who had come over to bake traditional local flatbread with me, as we talked about the room where I had, as usual, accommodated her. We knew we were talking about the same upstairs room, since it has always been her favourite. My sisters and I have always referred to it as Sirpa’s room—but to Sirpa, it is Taisto and Liisa’s chamber.

DWYAWR — Depends Who You Ask, Whose Room

About half a century ago, Taisto and Liisa worked as shopkeepers in the Suur-Lappi Cooperative store, which today is known as the atmospheric Pirtti of Mattilan talo. They lived there with their family in two rooms above the shop, the first of which was a kitchen (now known as the Old Kitchen, even though the room no longer has a wood-burning stove or running cold water). The chamber behind the Old Kitchen is the very one I’m writing about today.

When I moved to Mattila, the house also became a second home to my two daughters, Irene and Maria. Sirpa’s room is now known as the girls’ room. That feels right, because thirty years ago, when I lived in this house with my family, Grandmother Aune, and Aunt Sirpa, my sister Linda—who is the older of my two younger sisters—and I lived in that very same room. Before my sister and me, the room had been named after several others as well, but now that I think about it, it was never once called Tintti and Linda’s room. Back then, it was Sirpa’s room—even though Aunt Sirpa actually slept in the Old Kitchen, and every now and then had to witness our nighttime antics: conversations carried out entirely in the dream world, completely irrational, and the occasional tossing of soft toys across the room from one bed to the other.

The girls’ room is one of those rooms at Mattila that has never had electric radiators—and still doesn’t. The room is heated with a traditional masonry stove in the corner, just as it always has been. My younger daughter Maria is arriving in Impiö today, so I was up early putting a fire in the stove. By the afternoon, the room will be just the right temperature, and then it will cool down slightly towards the night. You know that feeling—how incredibly well you sleep in a slightly cooler room, when you get to burrow under a warm blanket? In the morning, stepping out from under it into the cool air makes you shiver a little, but that’s when you pull on woollen socks, add a few layers—and light a fire in the stove.

It would be such fun to hear the thoughts and memories of my dear relatives and others connected to the house’s history about the many names and stories of the girls’ room—perhaps in the comments on this post! I wonder… was the house’s very first television somehow connected to this room as well?

Tintti