 The villa was the third major house built with Ahlström money.In 1877 the founder of the company, Maire's grandfather Antti Ahlström, had built an imposing wooden house as a family residence in Noormarkku, a village a few miles inland from the town of Pori on Finland's west coast; at the turn of the century her father, Walter, commissioned an "art nouveau" house on a nearby site.As Aalto's biographer Göran Schildt has pointed out, each was representative of the values of their time