Marina Housing
Finland’s first floating village is under construction in Pori, a small city on the country’s west coast. The floating villas are very cool looking, have energy-saving technologies, and were designed to handle the occasionally extreme local weather. Sixteen such houses will be built when the project is complete. After Grist List moves into three of them, that leaves 13 for the rest of you.
Floating homes and other structures are popular right now all over the world, and while they do look cool, they will also become increasingly necessary as climate change puts more and more land under sea level.
The villas’ look is inspired by traditional boat sheds of this region, and their size will range from 560 to 1,000 square feet. The homes are transported on cargo ships in prefabricated modules and are then assembled and put onto pontoons, which are then anchored — we hope with very large anchors. The homes also feature heat recovery systems, which mean they use about 80 percent less energy than other similar size homes. Plus, they are nice warm places to drink aquavit and eat fish, and since that’s what a dwelling in Finland should aim for, these get an A.
