Jenny Zukerman is an Australian who has been living in Finland for almost five years and is the owner of The Lingua Tailor, a language services company.

A lone hunter is wandering in the dark trying to find home. He knows he is going in the right general direction. In the dim moonlight a flash of white suddenly appears in the corner of his eye. He approaches. The white flashes become the familiar window frames of his house. He walks round, finds the door frame and enters. This is how a hunter, farmer or traveller would find home or a farm to lodge for the night. Anyone who has driven through the Finnish countryside will have noticed that most houses have black roofs, red ochre walls and white window and door frames. Red ochre clay was easy to source and makes a non-toxic oil paint that dries quickly; therefore, it was the most common paint available, and is still in use today.

Since then other developments have changed the Finnish home. Upon entering a flat you are greeted by two doors insulating from cold and sound. This is replicated in the quadruple-glazed windows, which consists of two windows with two panes of glass each. For extra security you can lock the windows with a handle that has square shaped key on the end. This key often gets lost at the most inconvenient time, often just before summer.

The kitchen has a fantastic array of innovations: the drying rack cupboard is a known favourite. Doing the washing up, hiding your drying dishes in the cupboard and letting them drip away – and then ready for use – economises time brilliantly. If all shelves in the kitchen could be arranged like this, then you’d never have to dry another dish, or put it away, ever again! The chopping board drawer is practical yet frustrating, particularly if all your life you have opened the top drawer expecting cutlery. Under the kitchen sink you are then normally faced with two rubbish bins: energy waste (energiajäte), for anything that cannot be recycled, and biowaste (bio- ja puutarhajäte), the stinky one. If there are more, one can review the chart inside the cupboard door: paper (paperi), cardboard (kartonki), glass (lasi), metal (metalli) and hazardous waste (ongelmajäte).

The shower has just a screen to separate it from the rest of the bathroom, so the water flows out to most corners. Therefore, it is customary to have a squeegee to wipe away the flood. The toilet also has a small shower head which turns your toilet into a bidet and can also be used to hose down the sink and other parts of the bathroom. Making your bed with a fresh set of sheets usually requires acrobatics and problem-solving skills, but not in Finland. Finns, in their infinite practical wisdom, have put hand-holes at the “head” end of the doona cover for you to stick your hands through. So just grab the corners of your doona, pull and shake, voilá you’re done! Finnish innovation is forever expanding; hunters and farmers now not only rely on the white frames, but also utilise the flashlight and GPS built into their mobile phones.