Those Sweet Finnish Oddities (1): The Housewife's Salvation

Wild karaoke nights are one in many surprising customs of Finland, I did announce in a previous entry; yet the distinctive and unfamiliar Finnish thinking does not only express itself on a night out. The best place to get acquainted with it might rather be their homes, for which Finns have a particular, affectionate attention -- it's after all their warm refuge against the winter's frost. And like for most of their cultural features, from design to administration, the emphasis is on one thing: simplicity.


Past the original shock at the sight of Finnish drying shelves, the foreigner vacillates for an instant between attributing the idea either to the most ingenious fool or to the most simple-minded of masterminds; then, two pressing questions arise: First, how on Earth could it be needed to invent something as self-evident as Finland's astiankuivauskaapit? And secondly: Wait, how come it is not used in every country's kitchens already?

The second question remains inexplicably unanswered, for drying shelves possess all the characteristics of a great innovation: it's simple, it's inexpensive and uncomplicated, and it represents a significant gain of time and energy in the everyday life. Judge by yourself:

You've been warned.
Finns are actually well aware of he ingeniousness of their astiankuivauskaappi (lit. dish-drying closet) which they designated among the country's top inventions in a 2008 poll, a Reuters colleague reported here. So why did the idea never cross the border? Yet another piece of evidence that the much-too-staged side of Finland offered to the world's view only aims at keeping their best within?

There is indeed much to treasure in the idea: while in the rest of the world, people struggle with cluttered draining boards and rickety racks, here they do the dishes and simply store them away inside the cupboard. The water is dripping from the racks into the sink below, and plates and glasses are conveniently ready for use in less time than needed to wipe them all dry. Et voilà...


The world's ignorance of Finland's astiankuivauskaappi is such that there's no official translation of the word in English, while its use only reached Sweden and Italy; a laconic Wikipedia page in native language indicates that the sparkle of lucidity came from a Household lecturer as early as 1945 -- Household studies being still nowadays a subject leading to academical degrees in Finland, often under the name "Home Economics".

That Maiju Gebhard was certainly a lovely person. She who aimed at reducing the strain of daily chores calculated that a housewife would spend 30,000 hours of her life doing the dishes. Her motto was "Tärkeintä kodissa ovat sen ihmiset" (The most important in a house is its inhabitants). Gebhard's plate-drying closets started to be manufactured in 1954 and became standardized in 1982.


Dishwashers may have shifted to some extent the dishes' burden from people's shoulders, but wherever it is not, once you've tried the housewife's salvation, you cannot go without.