Kurula´s Resort

Hotel Kurula’s is located amidst the rugged beauty of Pyhätunturi fell. Completed in February 2023, this hotel on the shore of Lake Pyhäjärvi offers its customers peaceful luxury and a feeling of escaping from an increasingly hectic world.

Read the article in Finnish here.

In all, the hotel complex has three buildings: one for accommodations, one multi-purpose building for events, and a separate shorefront sauna. The client wanted to build a superior, environmentally friendly hotel that would stand out from the competition. Kurula’s is indeed the area’s only lakeside hotel and lies a convenient distance from the hustle and bustle of the ski slopes.

The hotel offers 17 spacious apartments with timeless interiors that exude comfort and a feeling of luxury. Each apartment has its own kitchen, sauna, and terrace, and a beautiful view of the Soutaja fell on the opposite side of the lake. Guests can join in activities from right in the front of the hotel.

It was clear from the start that events needed their own building to avoid disturbing the hotel’s guests. This multi-purpose building has a reception, dining room, bar, meeting room, and a lounge with its own fireplace.

On the shorefront, a wood-heated sauna and its accompanying terrace and jacuzzi entice guests to sit down and unwind. The custom-built sauna draws its design inspiration from the amethyst mine on Luosto fell. According to Janne Kantee, the architect behind the Kurula´s complex, the design centred on environmental friendliness and providing the customers a refuge from fast-paced modern life. Log was selected as the hotel’s building material for its small carbon footprint alongside its visual appeal, and water-source geothermal heating further increases the hotel’s environmental friendliness.

The plot’s steep profile restricted the placement of the buildings, which caused its own design challenges since the hotel wanted each apartment to have a view of the surrounding wilderness. The lakeside scenery appears to flow into the apartments through the large window surfaces, blurring the line between indoors and outdoors and weaving them together. Kantee says that despite the modern facilities, they didn’t want to give the hotel an unnecessarily modern appearance and opted instead for a timeless look more in line with the surroundings.

Technical solutions

The ground floor of this three-storey hotel has a stone structure, while the top two floors are built from 240×203 non-settling laminated spruce logs. The partitioning walls are also made of wood, but they have vertical frames to improve sound insulation. Visible interior surfaces are treated with a translucent glaze to retain the natural beauty of the material. Honkatalot, a supplier with previous experience from several hotel projects, was chosen as the building supplier.

The hotel wanted to maximise the amount of visible wood and therefore enlisted a fire safety consultancy from the very beginning of the design process. “In the accommodation facilities, the consultancy used simulations of how fires would develop to investigate whether the log surfaces of the exterior walls could be left visible indoors, in other words without protective cladding and fire protection. They also studied how much non-fireproof wood cladding could be used to hide the protective sheeting of the partition walls and ceiling. The analysis factored in how the wooden surfaces would affect the fire and the total fire load of the rooms. This provided data on the permitted fire loads of the rooms and the amount of visible wood surface that would not exceed the fire stress of a standard fire. Our findings were that the external wall structures of the hotel rooms needed no fireproofing, and that individual parts of the partition walls and ceiling could also be covered with wood cladding,” says the site’s fire safety designer Mikko Nieminen, Palotekninen Insinööritoimisto Markku Kauriala Oy.

CREDITS

Janne Kantee, architect (SAFA), has acted as project leader and principal designer in numerous projects ranging from public buildings to commercial projects and high-class bespoke residential buildings. International projects from Marbella to The Hamptons. Notable recent projects include the hotel El Lodge in Sierra Nevada, Spain, Laukontorin paviljonki in Tampere, Finland and Villa Saimaanhelmi at the housing fair 2017 in Mikkeli, Finland.