Summer villas in Suvilahti

The first summer villas in Vaasa were built in the late 1700s. They were large and glamorous buildings with gardens where even peacocks could be seen. Villas of the city people started being built in mid 1800s around today’s Kuparisaari and Suvilahti.

Small cabins became popular starting in the 1920s. After the World War II, cultivation around the cabins became important, which is why some still perceive summer cabins as “work camps”.

In the 1950s increasingly more people could afford getting a summerhouse, which was often a small self-built cabin with a sauna, made from boards gotten from one’s own land. The need for the city to expand and to get the coastal areas to public use led to the extinction of the villa areas in Suvilahti from the late 1960s.

The old villas on the map – Note that the villas are in private ownership.