There’s a purity and clarity to the result, which Aleksi, clearly a quick learner with an obsessive streak, designed and partly built himself, with an intimate sympathy for the island’s rocky contours. For the narrow main building, with its covered outdoor cooking area separating the bedroom and living space from the bathroom and sauna, he was inspired by Japanese small-house minimalism, but also wanted a traditional gabled roof (“Japanese and Finnish design have this unlikely crossover,” he says). An adjacent building houses Aleksi’s hyper-organized tool shed, and a room full of contraptions that keep the place running, including extra-large batteries and an elaborate seawater-purification system. While professionals built much of the main structure, Aleksi took a three-and-a-half-month sabbatical to create the jetty, low-impact walkways, and many sea-view seating areas, as well as using his self taught carpentry skills on the cozy interiors, with picture windows at either end. The best view, naturally, is from the sauna.
The somewhat manic intensity of the work behind the island is in sharp contrast to the mind-soothing experience of being a guest on it, with trips here organized by high-end villa rental company Stay One (the name relates to the finest one percent of home rentals). That sense is epitomized by the feeling of sweating in the sauna before running off the jetty into the cold water, all goosebumps and breathy delirium. I become compulsive about lighting fires, including the log burner in the cozy, neutral-toned living room with its hidden mezzanine. We explore every forest glade, tree swing, and outlook; every static muddy pool, each one a metropolis for tiny insects; the little castaway beach that Aleksi created with imported sand. In the sauna one evening, as I watch distant little islands darken in the gloaming, I think of something the TV personality Ben Fogle once told me about islands: that they are “discrete and legible”; places where animals like us can easily compute our surroundings, and find peace rather than chaos.
Despite being off-grid, we eat remarkably well. We arrive to find Tupperware containers and brown paper bags prepared by Ellen Järvinen and Will Brennan, who run Kallarvinden Café in Kasnäs. They contain everything from fennel-cured salmon to a beef and foraged mushroom pot pie, with beautifully branded sets of cooking instructions. The black micro-kitchen, like everything else, is an exercise in pared-back elegance and clever use of space. Everything fits seamlessly, from the dressing gowns by Lapuan Kankurit to the oils and bath products by Japanese-inspired local brand Hetkinen, with scents evocative of the forests.