Ice cool: a contemporary retreat in the heart of a winter wonderland

Deep in a Finnish forest, this lakeside summer house, home to a busy, retired couple and their extended family, is the perfect winter retreat, too

On the shores of Saimaa, Finland’s largest lake, surrounded by pine, fir and birch trees, sits an angular, architect-designed house, black on the outside, shiny white on the inside (and, when the snow arrives and the lake freezes, white all around, too). A three-hour drive north-east of the capital, it’s the almost full-time home of retired journalists Leena Karo and Seppo Toivonen. And the architect in question is their son, Tuomas Toivonen, who built his parents’ house in 2008.

The idea was to create a family home large enough for Leena and Seppo to live in year round (they also have an apartment in Helsinki) and for Tuomas, his sister Roosa, a film director, and their families to spend time there, too.

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Gardening tips: sow sweet peas

Then plant a witch hazel and buy a garden journal

Plant this Witch hazels are one of the earliest things to flower every year, their scented, spidery flowers in citrus shades unfurling to lure you into the garden for a sniff. These tolerant, hardy, slow-growing shrubs will do well in full sun or part shade. My favourite is ‘Jelena’ with its burnt-orange blooms.

Note this If the new year has filled you with anticipation for the growing season, it’s time to get organised. Green Conspiracy’s Garden Journal, is a beautifully designed notebook to record all your ideas.

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What to do with your Christmas tree | Alys Fowler

The needles make excellent ericaceous compost and the branches can be used for pea or bean supports

Is your Christmas tree looking a little sad? One might imagine it is by now, for the ghost has truly flown, and left a flurry of needles on your floor. Still, let us not waste this moment to honour the tree’s life with a good bit of recycling.

If I am honest, I don’t have a tree to recycle because I am not a fan of the Christmas tree tradition. So mostly I have to steal other people’s trees. I go around collecting up the corpses left out with the bins (clearly not the ones destined for the council recycling scheme) and take them back to my allotment.

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My wife has accidentally filled the garden with vermin | Tim Dowling

It feels as if the pests in our garden – squirrels, rats, pigeons, parakeets – are taking over

My oldest son and I are sitting at the kitchen table when my wife walks in, looks out of the window and sighs. It is the middle of a long, dark afternoon. Rain drops begin to hit the skylight.

“Today I found the dog barking at the hose caddy,” my wife says.

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My wife has accidentally filled the garden with vermin | Tim Dowling

It feels as if the pests in our garden – squirrels, rats, pigeons, parakeets – are taking over

My oldest son and I are sitting at the kitchen table when my wife walks in, looks out of the window and sighs. It is the middle of a long, dark afternoon. Rain drops begin to hit the skylight.

“Today I found the dog barking at the hose caddy,” my wife says.

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Why you should check your credit score before searching for a new home Nottingham Estate Agents

Buying or renting a new house can be stressful enough without nasty surprises such as a poor credit rating slowing things down, especially when it may be easy to improve if you know about it in advance. When choosing to rent, letting agents and landlords want to know you are credible and can pay your […]

The post Why you should check your credit score before searching for a new home appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.

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Let’s move to Shaftesbury, Dorset: an oasis of calm in these feverish times

It has entered the 21st century – but only just

What’s going for it? There’s a photo, an actual physical photo, of me – aged what, five? – standing atop Gold Hill in Shaftesbury on some roasting, golden afternoon in what, 1976? This was peak Shaftesbury season. Gold Hill had been beamed into everyone’s living room for years thanks to That Hovis Advert, directed by Ridley Scott (recently resurrected for the digital age), and everyone wanted to be seen there. These days it would be selfies and photobombs ricocheting through people’s Instagrams. In the 70s, we queued up quietly with our Polaroids. Odd, isn’t it, how an advert for bread seared itself on to the collective psyche? We didn’t have TikTok and billions of platforms to divert us back then, of course, so it was impossible to avoid. But there must also have been something reassuring, calming, medicating about the sepia-tinted sight of cobbles and thatch in the mid-70s, when Britain, like today, was going through yet another of its periodic, post-imperial nervous breakdowns. Shaftesbury, high on its hill, was ignored by the Industrial Revolution, bypassed by the railways, so its streetscape to this day has an air of the feudal, even Saxon past. It has entered the 21st century, but only just: shops such as Box of Allsorts take me right back to my childhood. Perching at the top of timeless Gold Hill again, gazing over the countryside below, however cheesy, is just the pulse-cooler I need in these feverish times.

The case against Off the beaten track but, perhaps, in an appealing way. Pricey. But everywhere’s pricey in Dorset.

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