“I’d never buy a summer cottage, but I rent the same one again and again”

“We have the loveliest cottage in the world. French doors have been cut into the south wall of the little wooden house. They open onto a deck that spans the width of the cottage, and from there you look out over a small lake framed by pines and birches. The separate sauna cabin sits so close to the water that all you can see from its windows are reeds and the lake itself.

The cottage and sauna are just the right size for my family of five. If I wanted to tell you the year it was built or its square footage, I’d have to call Jarkko. He’s the one who owns the place. That’s one of the best things about our cottage—we don’t own it.

Finland is the land of a thousand lakes and half a million summer cottages. According to the Cottage Barometer 2025, about four people use each cottage, so roughly two million Finns spend time at a cottage at least occasionally.

Cottaging has always mattered to me too. When I was a kid, we spent time at the cottage owned by my parents’ workplace. It was a half-hour drive from home. We’d have a sauna, swim, and fish with bits of sausage on our hooks so many times that the place became one of my core childhood memories. The workplace gave up the cottage 30 years ago, but I still sometimes think about its turf-roofed sauna, the lake’s sandy bottom, and the oddly placed garden swing.

In my twenties I went to cottages with friends. We’d pile into somebody’s parents’ place for the weekend with bags filled with clinking bottles and tubes of mustard for our grilled sausages. Between parties I dreamed of spending an entire week doing nothing but swimming, heating the sauna, and filling in crossword puzzles. Back then I had no idea what I’d end up doing with my life or whether it would include a second home. Secretly, I hoped it would.

Now I’m a middle-income forty-something with three kids, a mortgage on a row-house apartment, and a partner from a cottage-free family. When I began crunching the numbers, I realized cottage ownership just doesn’t add up.

From January to June 2024, the average sale price for a summer cottage in Finland was €143,000. Most deals were for recreational properties priced between €50,000 and €100,000, the real-estate industry reports. Those are hefty sums if you don’t inherit a cottage.

New cottages cost far more than that. Back in the 2010s the average new build was still about 49 square meters, but in the 2020s the figure has risen to 72. The Cottage Barometer says there are beds for an average of seven people, and more and more owners want to spend time at the cottage year-round. That means even higher expectations for decor and amenities—and bigger bills.

On top of that, owners spend roughly €2,500 a year on repairs, plus another €600–1,000 on property tax, waste collection, and electricity, depending on the municipality.

Costs climb because most Finnish cottages sit empty for much of the year. In 2024 Finns used their vacation homes an average of 85 days. Cottage time has fallen since the pandemic in 2020, when the figure was about 103 days. In winter, people visit about one weekend a month; in May and September about 9–10 days. From June through August they spend half—or more—of each month at the cottage.

Of the half-million Finnish cottages, only about 11,400 were listed for rent on the major online platforms in 2024. What are the remaining 488,600 cottages doing during the 271 days a year when their owners live in their primary homes? And what does a night at your own cottage really cost?

One night at Jarkko’s cottage costs about €160. On top of that, the trip sets our family of five back roughly another hundred in travel: return tickets on the commuter train, €24 in all, plus a taxi to the cottage and back to the station at €40 each way.

We took our first trip there two years ago. At the turn of 2023 someone asked me which dream I planned to realize in the coming year. A cottage was the first thing that popped into my head.

Once the wish was out in the open, my partner and I got busy. I’d learned that the best summer cottages get booked already in winter. We scrolled rental sites every evening for about a week. We wanted a cottage by water that we could reach from Helsinki without a car. That meant it had to be accessible by public transport or a reasonably priced taxi from a station or stop. We’d need a grocery store too. We had the train route map, Google Maps for the nearest shops, and the rental listings open in parallel tabs because the platforms don’t provide all the details at once.

And logistics weren’t the only criteria. We needed running water and a safe swimming spot for the kids. And because we were chasing a dream, I wouldn’t settle for some graveyard of battered furniture. The cottage had to be lovely.

Jarkko’s cottage was a jackpot. The small cabin has everything we need, plus a trampoline and a flat-screen TV. The train station is just over ten kilometers away. The nearest big grocery store is right next to the station, and on several days a week their home-delivery van drives all the way to the cottage.

We booked our next visit while we were still on our first one. That’s how wonderful the cottage felt—and precisely because it was a rental.

At the cottage I never have any mandatory chores beyond cooking and washing dishes—and even those aren’t truly mandatory. Sometimes the kids have eaten cold hot dogs on the sauna benches for dinner.

At the cottage I heat the sauna, read, laze around, and swim. When the kids have ideas, I’m in no rush to do anything else. That’s why I’ve learned to do a seat drop on the trampoline—my personal record is 57 in a row. If the cottage were ours, I’d have something more “important” on my mind all the time.

For me, cottage life means stripping away everything obligatory. If we owned the place, there’d be an endless list of to-dos.

While I’m relaxing head-to-toe at the cottage each summer, I notice the pile of flagstones on the edge of the gravel road, the sauna door’s peeling paint, and the stack of firewood waiting behind the woodshed. I don’t have to do a thing about them. Since there’s nothing mandatory, even the weather doesn’t matter. A rainy week in a rental cottage is just as good as a sunny one; in both, I can do everything I want—heat the sauna, fry pancakes, gaze at the lake, and forget my obligations.

When I visit in April, the dock has a new extension. The next time I walk out after Midsummer, it’s gone. In between, the extra winter windows have been put away. When we arrive, the beds are made with fresh sheets and the bathroom holds a stack of clean towels. The dry toilet has been emptied and someone’s restocked the toilet paper, detergent, and pancake mix. All I’ve done is send Jarkko a few hundred euros on my digital wallet and packed our swimsuits.

When our cottage weekends end at noon on Sunday, I leave the key on the table, pull the door shut, and load a couple of backpacks into the taxi trunk. On the way to the station I text Jarkko: thanks again, it was wonderful, we’ll be back.

With a rental cottage you can’t necessarily go exactly when you want. That’s the main argument against renting, and it’s true. It’s the price we pay for not owning. To me, it’s a fair price for the total reset the cottage gives.

Besides, owning a cottage—or anything, really—doesn’t guarantee you get to enjoy it endlessly whenever you want.

When you don’t own a cottage, you never have an obligation to go there. This July we want to go Interrailing in Europe instead. While we’re away, we won’t be fretting about an empty cottage—that wouldn’t be very ecological anyway. Sharing one is, especially if you find a rental close to home and on a public-transport route.

Renting is also more flexible than owning. This summer our cottage criteria are different because we’ve invited my entire family. We need beds for 14 people, so we’re spending our cottage budget on a log villa whose sauna can fit us all at once. We’ll certainly go to Jarkko’s cottage another time, maybe in September.

Until then, we already miss the place.”