SEARCH


 


The upper floor at Ainola


During the years that Ainola has been a museum, the upper floor has been closed to visitors. It has been reserved for the private use of the family. The upstairs vestibule is reached via the stairs in the dining room. On the stairs there is a cupboard which the daughters called the Fox Burrow. This cupboard and the cupboard in the study upstairs housed the composer's cigar boxes.

In the cupboard of the upstairs vestibule there many music notes, e.g. the daughters' piano exercises. Above the kitchen there is a guestroom, and next to that a large bedroom. The Sibeliuses moved in here after the repairs in the late summer of 1911. Jean Sibelius began to sleep downstairs in the 1940s, when he began to have trouble climbing the stairs, and the bedroom was left to Aino Sibelius. 

Jean Sibelius's study is above the drawing room, where Sibelius prepared his works from the autumn of 1911, beginning with the suite Scènes historiques. From the 1940s on Sibelius worked downstairs. The upstairs study became a guest room for the grandchildren, who tried to get to sleep in spite of the scowling of the frightening Beethoven statue by Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa.