rettig palace

In the spring (so, a long time ago - yikes) I visited this exhibition on the Rettig Palace for its 90th anniversary. The palace is where the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova museum is located nowadays, but it used to be the home - "palace" - of the von Rettig family. I'd already been interested in learning more about the palace and the Rettigs, so this was perfect!

The Rettigs have owned a family business that is mostly known for tobacco manufacturing, and at some point members have been the richest person in Finland. So, you can imagine that this palace from the 1920s is pretty impressive. It's almost completely walled in for privacy, the garden is really pretty and the many rooms are lovely. What I was most excited for, though, was that for this exhibition they'd given access to rooms that aren't usually in use for exhibitions and you could see material to give a better impression of what the interiors would've looked like originally. (Obviously it's very different now, normally, as it has to function as a museum!)

They had original illustrations of plans for the palace - some of which were executed, some of which were not, Rettigs' belongings, photographs and collections, original wallpapers, furniture, and so on. Basically, all kinds of weird and wonderful things that I love seeing. In such a big house they had so many rooms for personal use, hobbies, entertaining and also the servants' quarters, but for a 20s household they also had some really modern things like a strange lift (not the one in the pictures, but a strange panorama one that you could use to go up to just look at the view?) and other peculiarities and luxuries. In addition to that, there were also little video interviews with people who still are alive from back then - who aren't that hard to find, since the palace only stopped being a private home come 1980! The stories from people like the driver's family who were also living in the palace were really interesting.

The whole exhibition was really interesting - my favourite they've had in all my time in Turku. Even though, it isn't on anymore, it's still worth going to AV&AN. It's a cool mixture of history and art, and you can still get a sense of the palace as it once was (though not as completely as during this exhibition, probably!).