It started with a trip to Helsinki in August of 1937. Two influential San Francisco designers—architect William Wurster and landscape architect Thomas Church—were eager to meet the great Finnish modernist Alvar Aalto. They had written to Aalto’s Helsinki office to say they were coming, but on arrival were told he was away.
Wurster and Church, who was accompanied by his wife, Betsy, then hired a chauffeur, who, it turned out, knew the local architectural sights and recently had given none other than Frank Lloyd Wright a tour. Betsy later recalled that the driver didn’t speak English and “was just driving hell-bent and knew exactly what we should see. He’d stop and he’d wave his arms at these various things that I don’t even remember—they weren’t so significant—but it was extraordinary.”
After a bit, the trio handed the driver a scrap of paper bearing the name and address of Aalto, who lived in a nearby suburb. Understanding their purpose at last, the chauffeur drove “at breakneck speed and careened out into the country—shot like a bullet! We kept trying to get him to go more slowly,” Betsy remembered. “It was so terribly dangerous. All of a sudden, with a tremendous burst of breaks and everything, he drew up in front of this very beautiful modern house.” They asked the chauffeur whose home it was, but he ignored their question.
The Americans were greeted at the door by a pleasant woman who spoke deeply accented English. “Ah, but you have telephoned,” said Aino Aalto. Wurster and Thomas Church kept asking who had designed the house, and in their excitement they failed to hear her reply to Betsy: “But it is my hoosband.”
Aino’s husband had just returned from an all-night drive and was not expecting visitors. But Alvar Aalto heard the commotion at the door and suddenly emerged in
