Villa Mairea was a villa, guest-house and rural retreat built by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto for Maria and Harry Gullichsen in Noormarkku, Finland. The Gullichsen's were a wealthy couple and 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 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 was 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 were situated in the angle of the L, with a variety of rooms looking over them. Horizontals and overhangs in the main composition echoed the ground plane, and the curved pool wedded the nearby forest topography. In contrast, to the these softening devices, the main facade had a more rigid, formal mood, and even possessed a canopy restated in a garden pergola vocabulary of bindings, poles and slats. The interiors of the Villa Mairea were richly articulated in wood, stone and brick. The spaces varied in size from the grand to the cabin like. Finlandia Hall. ... Noormarkku (Norrmark in Swedish) is a municipality of Finland. ...