Futuro House Production Revived in Finland After Decades-Long Hiatus

A new Futuro House, the flying-saucer-shaped dwelling designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, has been built for the first time in decades and installed at Kaisaniemi Botanical Gardens in Helsinki. The structure, completed in late June 2026 as the 21st Futuro built in Finland and fitted out with an interior by Finnish brand Marimekko, was shown to the public during Helsinki Design Week, which ran from 28 August to 6 September.

Suuronen designed the Futuro in 1968 as a portable ski cabin, built from fibreglass-reinforced plastic panels that could be assembled quickly in remote, snowy terrain. British critic Justin McGuirk once described it as “the closest housing ever came to product design”. Fewer than 100 units were ever produced, and manufacturing stopped soon after the 1973 oil crisis pushed plastic prices sharply upward. Roughly 60 examples are thought to survive worldwide today, in a range of conditions.

How the Futuro House project restarted

The revival traces back to 2024, when Dutch-American preservation architect Jan van Dijs, known for restoring mid-century houses in California, was tipped off by a friend to a Facebook listing. An executive at Finnish composites firm Exel Composites was trying to sell the original Futuro production moulds. Van Dijs recalled thinking, “How fascinating if we could actually do this”.

He was not deeply familiar with the Futuro at that point. “I dug in a little bit, I started to learn about the history,” he told Dezeen. “And I start to realise that it’s something of a fascinating story.” He also described staying cautious about the odds of success: “I really had my doubts that all the pieces were there, that they could be restored, so I tried to keep all of that in check.”

The original 20 Futuro Houses made in Finland had been produced by a plastics firm called PolyKem, whose assets, including the moulds, were absorbed by Exel after PolyKem’s bankruptcy in the early 1990s, a collapse that reportedly coincided with Suuronen losing his own home. For years afterward the moulds sat in storage with no clear purpose.

Suuronen died in 2013, so Van Dijs spent months working to win over the architect’s family, who had grown wary after previous approaches from people with underdeveloped plans. “I couldn’t just buy the moulds and build this thing, I needed to have a license, and I needed to have their support,” Van Dijs said. “The reality was, unless I could do that, there was no future for this project.” Exel’s Jyrki Aho helped broker the family’s trust before his death shortly afterward.

Rebuilding decades-old moulds

When Van Dijs travelled to inspect the moulds in May 2025, he found them abandoned outdoors, close to 60 years old. “The moulds looked like hell,” he said, describing grass and moss overtaking the surfaces. Despite that, he pressed ahead, partnering with Finnish fabricator Ekin Muovi to refurbish the moulds and recast the panels, even matching the original paint colours from surviving flecks on the tooling.

The work proved harder than expected. Unlike modern two-part moulds, Suuronen’s design used a single-part mould, meaning trapped air had to be worked out by hand rather than pressed out mechanically. “It’s all hand labour,” Van Dijs said. “Nobody does it like that anymore.” A single panel could take days rather than hours to cast, a bottleneck Van Dijs believes also hampered the Futuro commercially in the 1970s.

An unplanned bonus emerged during the process: the mould set also included Suuronen’s original furniture designs, including built-in lounge seating, a dining table and the Orbit chair, all of which were reproduced alongside the house. The full fabrication took five months, and Van Dijs puts the total cost, including mould restoration, at roughly 450,000 euros, though he expects future units could be built for under 300,000 euros.

Marimekko’s interior and what comes next

For its Helsinki Design Week debut, Marimekko divided the Futuro’s single room into three zones: a lounging and sleeping area, a space for eating and working, and a small kitchenette. Creative director Rebekka Bay said the brief was forward-looking. “It was really important to sort of create a proposal for future ways of living,” she said, adding that the team wanted to explore how the house might actually be inhabited now. “I think there is a real trend for downscaling, and we felt that the Futuro House is sort of speaking to that.”

Talks are underway about where this particular Futuro will end up, with Van Dijs favouring a public location in Finland. Bay suggested a different future. “I hope it will move somewhere into the countryside and someone will be using it as their summer cabin,” she said. “I think that would be wonderful.”

Van Dijs intends to take further orders, but supply will stay limited. “Casting moulds are just like the plates for a print; they are designed for a limited number of editions,” he said, estimating the restored tooling has enough life left to produce between four and six more houses before it must be retired for good. He argues the Futuro deserves recognition it never received in its own era. “I think the Futuro should be considered an icon of Finnish design, which was not the case when it was originally produced,” he said.