EP369 · Economy · first published 2026-01-27
Building a cabin without the pain | Veli-Matti Kurkela | Negotiator 369
Veli-Matti Kurkela, CEO of Salvos, explains why leisure-home building is the one segment of Finnish construction that bends to industrial manufacturing: the average floor area of a new leisure building is about 60 square metres, a two-module cabin is installed on site in a day or two, and order-to-handover runs roughly six months at a price fixed in advance. The episode's most concrete passage is the Building Act that came into force on 1 January 2025 and exempted utility buildings under 30 square metres from the building permit — while a leisure dwelling still needs one at any size, and the statute is stricter than the episode has time to say. Also covered: the economics of Lapland's accommodation capacity, a 40-module complex delivered to Ounasvaara, towable cabins on wheels, the cautionary tale of Lehto, and the national cottage barometer, some of whose figures turn out sharper than the episode's recollection. The episode is a commercial collaboration with Salvos Oy.
Building a cabin without the pain | Veli-Matti Kurkela | Negotiator 369
Summary: Veli-Matti Kurkela, CEO of Salvos, explains why leisure-home building is the one segment of Finnish construction that bends to industrial manufacturing: the average floor area of a new leisure building is about 60 square metres, a two-module cabin is installed on site in a day or two, and order-to-handover runs roughly six months at a price fixed in advance. The episode’s most concrete passage is the Building Act that came into force on 1 January 2025 and exempted utility buildings under 30 square metres from the building permit. Also covered: the economics of Lapland’s accommodation capacity, a 40-module complex delivered to Ounasvaara, towable cabins on wheels, the cautionary tale of Lehto, and the national cottage barometer.
Commercial collaboration. The episode is a commercial collaboration with Salvos Oy, and the guest is the company’s CEO. This article marks explicitly which figures are the company’s own account and which have been checked against an independent source.
How to read this
This is a sponsored episode. The host says so in the second minute: “This really is made in commercial collaboration with Salvos” [01:33]. The guest is the sponsor’s CEO, so the company’s production volumes, delivery times and service promises are the company’s own account, not verified facts. The article presents them as such.
The industry and legal passages have been checked. The Building Act sections are read from the statute itself, and the cottage barometer figures from the government’s own publication. Where the episode and the source differ, the article states the difference rather than quietly correcting it.
The episode’s YouTube chapter list does not match the recording. Its entries fall exactly 2 minutes 54 seconds apart and continue to 55 minutes, although the episode runs 48:47 — that list was calculated, not listened to. The timestamps in this article are read from the episode’s own subtitle track.
Quotations are spoken language. They have been tidied for readability by dropping filler words; the substance is left as it was said.
Construction is not one market
The episode starts from the distress of the construction industry, and Kurkela immediately denies that this is the whole picture. The point is the split.
“Construction has really taken a beating in recent years, and the market has been carved up anew — an absolutely staggering number of bankruptcies. Single-family home and residential construction especially is still in a pretty difficult situation.” [00:48]
On the other side are the segments where demand has held: road and infrastructure construction, commercial premises and wellness facilities, and garden buildings plus a certain segment of leisure construction. “It’s somewhat polarised” [01:33], Kurkela sums up.
The host acknowledges the residential side from his own position: as the owner of an apartment in central Helsinki, “it’s a bit nasty to look at that minus 20 percent” — and adds straight away that it does not affect his life, because the loss has not been realised [01:33].
This split is the background assumption of the whole episode. While the rest of construction is in recession, leisure construction has demand, capacity and — as the host later points out — an unusually good moment for the buyer: “The project risk is a bit lower too, when there’s more capacity around, so you’re not fighting over the same resources the way you would in a boom” [25:48].
What the cottage barometer says — and what the episode says about it
Mökkibarometri 2025, the Finnish government’s national cottage barometer, had just been published when the episode was recorded, and both men refer to it repeatedly. It is the episode’s only independent data source, so its figures are worth reading carefully.
Checked. According to Mökkibarometri 2025, the share of retired owners has risen to 55 percent from 52; the distance to the leisure home averages 91 kilometres (median 45 km) and about one hour 18 minutes; cottages were used an average of 85 days in 2024; and the economic impact of cottage life is roughly €6.4 billion a year, of which goods and services connected to building and renovation account for about €1.3 billion. (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Mökkibarometri 2025 publication)
A correction to what was said in the episode. Kurkela recalls the average distance as “well over a hundred kilometres” and says himself that he does not remember the figure [03:07]. The barometer’s figure is 91 kilometres, and the median is markedly shorter at 45. The host’s roughly 2-hour-40-minute drive to Sysmä is therefore longer than a typical cottage trip, not normal — though the episode treats it as normal. On the share of pensioners Kurkela says “over 50 percent” [18:02], which is right.
The barometer’s most interesting number for this episode is the amenity level. Owners estimate that only 29 percent of cottages are winter-habitable; 75 percent are connected to the electricity grid, 34 percent have a heat pump (28 percent in 2020) and 12 percent a fixed broadband connection (8 percent in 2020). (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry)
Those numbers explain what Kurkela means when he says expectations have risen:
“The requirement level has gone up quite a lot. People want year-round living, electricity, heating, fibre. Remote work has brought a lot of that.” [18:50]
In other words: three quarters of the existing stock is still a three-season building left cold over the winter, but what buyers want from a new one is something else. For the old stock, Kurkela says, this leads to a question the seller does not always want to ask out loud:
“Is it worth starting to renovate, or does it need replacing? There’s been quite a lot of the kind where we’ve handled the demolition through a subcontractor and brought in a completely new solution.” [19:37]
Why a cabin, specifically, is an industrial product
The most analytical passage in the episode is the explanation of why industrial module manufacturing has spread into leisure construction but not into housing. Kurkela’s answer is logistics and size.
“If we’re talking about bigger buildings, like a residential solution for your own home, logistics are challenging and really expensive, so the cost benefit of industrial manufacturing gets eaten up by the logistics — and you still end up doing on-site construction anyway.” [11:00]
In a leisure building the proportions are different:
“Based on Statistics Finland’s data, the average floor area of new leisure buildings was something like 60 square metres. For us that’s the bread-and-butter size in cottage buildings.” [11:46]
Sixty square metres is two transportable modules. Because the company can join two spaces in a weather-protected way, the parts stay small enough to move cost-effectively and the benefit of factory manufacturing survives [11:46]. The worked example: “a 64-square-metre cabin with its own bathroom, two bedrooms and a large open-plan living room and kitchen. It’s essentially two modules, installation time on site one or two days, and it arrives completely finished.” [40:29]
The other half of the explanation is why conventional turnkey house suppliers have not moved in:
“Turnkey suppliers aren’t hugely interested in leisure construction. The buildings are fairly small, and leisure construction sits outside the growth centres. You have to haul materials and labour out to the regions, which is really expensive.” [12:32]
So the field stayed, in Kurkela’s account, a traditional materials-supply business in which the customer organises the construction themselves or through subcontractors — and that is exactly what made it fertile ground for an industrial player. Salvos started with garden buildings, garden saunas and storage huts and moved from there into cabins [13:18].
The service promise: permit, foundations, finished building
The company’s own concept, as its CEO describes it:
“We apply for the leisure-home permit on the customer’s behalf, do the necessary groundwork and foundations, and deliver a completely finished building. The average delivery time from order to handover is roughly half a year, and all the costs are defined in advance.” [14:53]
This is the company’s service promise, not verified information. The argument underneath it, though, is more general and testable: distance makes a self-organised cabin project expensive through materials management. Kurkela’s example is roofing felt:
“You have to order enough felt that it doesn’t run out, because if it does, that’s an insane cost — you may have to drive hundreds of kilometres to a hardware store. So you over-order. And then there’s how much waste you end up with.” [15:39]
In a factory the same problem does not arise: “Take the roll of felt: when it runs out, you cut it where it’s enough for this building and carry on with the next one.” [15:39] This is the familiar waste argument for industrial production, and it holds more strongly the further away the site is.
The host confirms the same from his own experience with a plot in Suvisaaristo, Espoo: a sloping site meant “an extra hundred square metres popped up in the cellar” on top of the plan, and even with a construction foreman involved, “you still had to take a position on every single thing and sweat over it” [16:26]. The outcome was that the zoned plot was sold at a profit and the next owner built something smaller.
The 30-square-metre rule: what the statute actually says
The single clearest piece of information in the episode is the new Building Act, which Kurkela praises unusually bluntly:
“Whenever legislators get slated for adding bureaucracy, credit has to be given here. An absolutely great thing.” [21:08]
What the episode says: the new Building Act came into force at the start of 2025, and utility buildings under 30 square metres were released from the building-permit requirement, provided there is building right and the building regulations are followed [21:54].
Checked — and the statute contains two qualifications the episode does not get to.
The Building Act came into force on 1 January 2025 (Rakentamislaki, chapter 18, section 193). The permit threshold is in section 42, and it is two-pronged: a building permit is required if the object is a residential building — at any size — or if it is at least 30 square metres or 120 cubic metres (Rakentamislaki, chapter 5, section 42). Floor area alone therefore does not settle it: a tall or otherwise voluminous building under 30 square metres can still cross the volume limit.
The second qualification matters more. The same section’s second paragraph brings the permit requirement back if the construction has “more than a minor effect on land use, the townscape, the landscape, cultural heritage or environmental considerations”, if it requires official supervision to ensure that the essential technical requirements are met, or if building control needs to supervise the project in the public interest (Rakentamislaki, chapter 5, section 42). A shoreline plot in a landscape-sensitive location is precisely the case where this paragraph applies — so “under 30 square metres needs no permit” is the main rule, not an automatic one.
Kurkela states the other half of the threshold exactly right himself:
“The law starts from the idea that under 30 square metres is a utility building. If a main building goes onto the plot — a cabin, that is — then whether it’s 30 square metres or 64, it always requires a permit, because it’s a leisure dwelling. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this.” [41:18]
That matches the statute: a residential building is its own ground for a permit under section 42, paragraph 1, point 1, regardless of size.
The fixed cooking range is not in the law — and Kurkela says so himself. Asked what determines whether a building counts as residential, he answers:
“There’s no law that says it directly, but it was outlined during the drafting, from a fairly high level, that if the building has a fixed cooking range, then it’s considered a building intended for residential use. If it doesn’t, then under certain conditions it could be a garden building. But it isn’t written in any law.” [42:06]
This is a good example of how an application guideline lives outside the statute. The practical consequence in the episode’s own example: the shoreline guest cabin the host is imagining would fit inside the permit-free 30 square metres without a fixed range, but the cabin itself would not [42:52].
Did building run wild? That was the central fear about the reform, and Kurkela’s answer is no — though he marks the uncertainty himself:
“There’s not much history yet, of course — a year behind us — but there are no signs of it running wild. On the contrary: vitality increased, everybody wins. So my message is simply: more of this.” [47:27]
He also notes that Sweden made a comparable reform earlier with good results [21:54], and that the workload of municipal building control eased at the same time as demand grew [22:41]. These are his observations of the market, not research findings.
What people actually do with 30 square metres
This is the most practical passage in the episode, and it is interesting precisely because the permit-free building is no longer just a shed. Kurkela’s list of what a detached garden building gets used for:
“They’re really versatile: hobby spaces, band rooms, someone uses one for painting, there’s a podcast studio, a home gym.” [24:15]
And two cases where a separate space solves an everyday problem: a remote-work room you can reach from the middle of a family household, and a space for teenagers that is still under the parents’ eye [24:15].
The host’s reaction to 30 square metres illustrates the scale confusion that is the most common misunderstanding about this rule. His first response is that 30 square metres “sounds pretty small” [20:23] — until Kurkela points out that as a garden sauna it is generous: “You don’t need much beyond the sauna and maybe a changing room. This would be a sauna cabin with a living room and a sauna.” [20:23] For comparison, the host recognises his own meeting room: 16 square metres, half of that [21:08].
Kurkela’s own cabin is the best evidence here. It is in Puolanka, solid log and built on site — “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” — with a floor area of 25 square metres: a living room, a small kitchen, a sauna and washing facilities [26:35].
Lapland’s accommodation capacity: why a hotel does not pay
The best piece of business logic in the episode concerns Lapland, and it starts from the season.
“The tourism business is so seasonal — say four months — that from a hotel developer’s point of view, that season makes building one not really sensible.” [05:32]
When hotel capacity does not get built, demand moves in two directions: to resort-type cabin villages and to Airbnb. The resort model, in Kurkela’s account, is the more capital-efficient one:
“Compared with building a hotel — the cost per square metre and the return on capital are on a completely different level in a space built less heavily, which is nevertheless very much a luxury and a good solution.” [09:25]
The company’s own reference case: a 40-module accommodation complex for Ounasvaara in Rovaniemi, contract at the end of March and delivery by the end of October [08:40]. The factory produces, Kurkela says, roughly 600 modules a year [08:40]. Both are the company’s own figures.
The other half of the same equation is the Rovaniemi Airbnb dispute, which the host raises via a Helsingin Sanomat article [04:44]. Kurkela reads it above all as a symptom of the capacity problem — when supply is short of demand, it leaks into short-term rental — and names the side effect directly:
“If you live in a block with 25 apartments and 20 of them are in Airbnb use, that can make life pretty restless.” [07:05]
He also separates it from his own industry: this is about accommodation business and zoning provisions, not the cabin business [05:32].
Kurkela’s own experience of short-term rental is the most surprising detail in the episode, and it is an owner’s perspective rather than an investor’s: he put his 25-square-metre sauna cabin on Airbnb because during the busy family years he hardly used it.
“I was genuinely surprised, because I thought the space was so small. Demand has been really good, foreign tourists too, and the reviews have been good.” [27:20]
That is the same observation as the barometer’s amenity figures from the other direction: a small space is enough if the electricity, water and connections work.
The towable cabin and the foundation question
Alongside Salvos runs a subsidiary, Lapeland, with a factory in the same Pyhäntä and products that sit on wheels: trailer saunas and trailer cabins [28:53]. The idea’s ancestor is part of Finnish political memory:
“Older folks may remember Paavo Väyrynen’s skid cottage — as an MP you have to determine your home municipality, so he had this mobile log cabin.” [30:24]
The advantage of a movable solution, in Kurkela’s account, is twofold: no foundations are needed at all, and the building is not tied to the plot. The use case is a plot shared within an extended family, or two locations in different parts of the country — “somebody likes to be in Lapland in winter, but then they have a summer place somewhere else, say in Kainuu” [30:24].
Foundations are the cabin buyer’s most common fear, and the host puts it directly: moisture and mould damage often comes from poor foundations. Kurkela’s answer separates two solutions:
“The Lapeland solution needs no foundations at all. We ourselves use a pillar foundation: the base floor ventilates continuously, so nothing gets a chance to fester.” [31:11]
He adds immediately that in the old cabin stock the risk really is higher, because “they were put together however” and decades back you find concealed-plinth solutions [31:57]. This is the same argument as the earlier demolish-or-renovate question — and it is the seller’s argument, so it is worth holding as one.
Production: the real bottleneck in mass customisation
The host asks about production through his own board work (Fredman Group, whose robotics featured in an earlier episode; wearing his Translink hat he mentions the listed Norrhydro, which built an entirely new production facility with the proceeds of its offering) [32:43]. The answer demolishes the image of a finished production line:
“Absolutely not. The overwhelming majority of the solutions are customised by the customer themselves. If you have a plot, it’s always a bit unique — which way the windows face and how the cabin gets in there.” [32:43]
So the bottleneck is not manufacturing but line loading:
“The biggest thing in production efficiency is done at the planning stage: how the production is loaded. If it’s loaded badly, you get problems on the line and it shows immediately in throughput.” [33:30]
The contrast with a car factory is precise: “A car factory is repetition, and that gives you a certain law you can follow. Here the situation changes and lives all the time, so you have to follow the data quite closely.” [33:30]
The most concrete example of the loading problem is drying time: when one building takes a lot of bathroom tiling relative to its size and the next takes none, “you understand what that means on an industrial line — drying times and all of that. It takes quite a bit of juggling.” [38:56]
The same variable explains why the cabin side is harder than housing: a residential building has a standard you must follow, whereas on the cabin side the amenity level ranges from gravity ventilation with no electricity or water all the way to a second-home solution [37:23].
What the industry has learned: LapWall, Lehto, Evac
The industry-history passage is short but dense, and it is written here as the participants present it.
LapWall sits next door to the Salvos factory in Pyhäntä, and Kurkela raises it as a competitor to learn from:
“They’ve conceptualised it really cleverly — they publish design guides, so you can design the building with their own LEKO components. It’s excellent, and it improves the construction industry’s otherwise weak productivity growth.” [35:04]
Both companies are part of the same northern Finnish industrial cluster, which this channel has covered before — the LapWall and Norrhydro listings had an episode of their own, Northern IPOs: Norrhydro and LapWall.
Lehto is the cautionary tale, and it is notable that both speakers refuse to draw from it the lesson usually drawn:
“Lehto was genuinely great in residential construction, really strong momentum in that work. It’s a shame the outcome was what it was — but it wasn’t their residential-construction expertise that failed, they were very skilled at that. They expanded too forcefully into areas they then no longer had under control.” [36:38]
In other words: modular construction did not bring Lehto down, unmanaged expansion beyond it did. That is a considerably more precise claim than the usual “modular construction doesn’t work in Finland”, and it matters here because the whole conversation rests on a defence of modularity.
Evac is the host’s example that Finnish modular expertise has been genuinely saleable: a modular solution in cruise-ship sanitation technology, the company sold “at a high price to foreign owners” [35:52]. The host finds that slightly regrettable but notes it is the industry’s usual path.
Bathroom modules are the same idea already working more widely: there are operators focused purely on bathroom modules and supplying them into housing construction [36:38].
AI: what a craft-heavy factory gets from it
Towards the end the host steers the conversation to digitalisation and mentions a mutual acquaintance, Mikko Alasaarela and his agent-farm concept [43:37]. Kurkela’s answer is interesting precisely because he starts from the sceptic’s position:
“You might quickly think that AI in a craft workshop like this — can it even use AI? But when we sat down with them, we came to the conclusion that there is a staggering number of things where productivity can be improved with AI. We do intend to invest in it seriously.” [44:22]
The concrete example that already works is digitalisation rather than AI, and it concerns sales: “A sales rep draws the model and it’s immediately with the customer in 3D. They look at it and say, ah, it’s like this, maybe that space could be different.” [45:07]
Both men think the next step is close: a customer standing on the plot sees the cabin in place and looks out of its window before anything has been built [45:53]. The host reckons it would not even be expensive to implement. Neither claims this is in use — it is a description of the future, and the article marks it as one.
The deeper AI conversation is explicitly deferred to the subscriber side of the channel [43:37], so this episode only scratches the subject.
A message to policymakers
The host closes by asking what public authorities could do. Kurkela does not use the opening to complain, which is the episode’s most consistent note: he has praised the legislator throughout, and the request is a continuation of that.
“I won’t start slating anyone, because that reform was excellent. Hopefully it encourages the legislator: when some bureaucracy is dismantled at the harder end, it doesn’t necessarily mean everything turns wild. Finns are a fairly rule-abiding people after all.” [46:42]
The host adds his own note on value-added tax: the 25.5 percent rate “could definitely be walked back down a bit, because everything that raises prices reduces demand”, summed up in his standing line: “Remember, girls and boys: the more you tax something, the less of it you get.” [48:13] He concedes immediately that Finland’s fiscal position makes this hard — “good advice comes expensive”.
This is the host’s own political position, not a demand from the guest, and the article marks it as such. A note on the source: the passage is indistinct in the subtitle track, and the figure 25.5 matches Finland’s general VAT rate, raised from 24 percent in September 2024.
What to take away
For a buyer. Three questions determine the cost structure of a cabin project: is the building under or over 30 square metres (and under or over 120 cubic metres), is it a dwelling or a utility building, and how far from a growth centre is the site. The first two settle the permit; the third settles whether to build on site or buy finished.
About the market. The construction recession is not one phenomenon. Leisure construction has spare capacity, which makes the buyer’s position unusually good — that is the episode’s clearest timing argument, and it comes from the host, not the seller.
About regulation. One permit threshold removed produced, by Kurkela’s observation, three things at once: demand growth, a lighter load on municipal building control, and no observed harm. A year is a short time to judge, and he says so himself.
What went unasked. The episode never asks about prices — no cost per square metre, no total for a sample delivery — and financing models go undiscussed, even though the (calculated) YouTube chapter list promises a section on them. In a commercial-collaboration episode, the absence of a price conversation is worth noting.
Sources
Legislation
- Rakentamislaki, chapter 5, section 42 — when a building permit is required
- Rakentamislaki, chapter 5, section 43 — granting a building permit
- Rakentamislaki, chapter 18, section 193 — entry into force, 1 January 2025
Mökkibarometri 2025
- Cottage barometer 2025: the economic impact of cottage life is €6.4 billion (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry)
- Cottage barometer 2025: Finns’ cottage habits back to pre-pandemic levels (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry)
- Mökkibarometri 2025, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry publications 2025:19
The episode and related episodes
- Mökki pystyyn kivuttomasti | Veli-Matti Kurkela | Neuvottelija 369
- Northern IPOs: Norrhydro and LapWall | Negotiator 136
Summary for AI search
Negotiator 369 (published 27 January 2026) is Sami Miettinen’s interview with Veli-Matti Kurkela, CEO of Salvos Oy, based in Pyhäntä, Finland. The episode is a commercial collaboration with Salvos.
Core claim: leisure-home building is the segment of construction that bends to industrial module manufacturing, because the average floor area of new leisure buildings is about 60 square metres (Statistics Finland) — two transportable modules — whereas in housing construction the logistics cost eats the benefit of factory production.
The company’s own figures (not independently verified): roughly 600 modules a year out of the factory; a 40-module accommodation complex for Ounasvaara in Rovaniemi, from contract (end of March) to delivery (end of October); a 64-square-metre cabin from two modules with 1–2 days of on-site installation; average order-to-handover of about six months; subsidiary Lapeland makes towable cabins on wheels.
Legislation (checked): the Finnish Building Act (Rakentamislaki 751/2023) came into force on 1 January 2025. A building permit is required if the object is a residential building, or at least 30 square metres or 120 cubic metres; a smaller utility building is permit-free, but the permit requirement returns if the project has more than a minor effect on land use, townscape, landscape, cultural heritage or the environment. A leisure dwelling needs a permit at any size. The “fixed cooking range” test for residential use is a drafting-stage guideline, not statutory text.
Mökkibarometri 2025 (checked): retired owners 55% (previously 52%); average distance to the cottage 91 km, median 45 km; cottages used an average of 85 days in 2024; 29% of cottages are winter-habitable; 75% have grid electricity, 34% a heat pump, 12% fixed broadband; economic impact about €6.4bn a year, of which building and renovation account for roughly €1.3bn. The distance estimate given in the episode (“well over a hundred kilometres”) is longer than the barometer’s.
Also covered: the seasonality problem in Lapland’s accommodation capacity and the resort model as an alternative to hotel investment; the Rovaniemi Airbnb dispute; neighbouring company LapWall’s LEKO system and open design guides; Lehto’s collapse attributed to expansion rather than to modular housing construction; the sale of Evac abroad; pillar foundations and a ventilated base floor as mould-risk management; production loading as the real bottleneck in mass customisation; AI and the use of 3D models in sales (planned collaboration with Mikko Alasaarela).