I have thought for some time that it would be much more convenient for day-to-day use to have our spare mattress in the library, rather than the enormous sofa in extremely bad shape that is currently there until we manage to get rid of it*. We don't have anything to put the spare mattress on, though, so while it's nicer for an overnight guest than the floor, it's not really ideal 'hanging out in the library' furniture.
Until when we were last at Ängisbacka helping my mother-in-law move things around in her attic, I saw, and fell in love with, THIS: a vintage steel heteka.
As Wikipedia and Wikisanakirja inform us on their Finnish sites, a heteka is a steel bedframe with springs, so called after the company Helsingin Teräshuonekalutehdas (Helsinki Steel Furniture Factory), founded 1932 by Kalle Kärkkäinen, and the most successful manufacturer of the common and extremely popular steel-frame hideaway beds before WW2. Here at the National Museum via Wikipedia.
I had neither heard of them nor seen them before; I just said "What is it?" and "It's so CUTE! It's so industrial and weird!"
Both @waxjism and my mother-in-law stared at me like I was crazy and suggested that it looked very ordinary, unprepossessing and kind of ugly (not in those exact words), but I babbled rapturously a bit about the kinds of television I could picture it in and uglycute and how old it looked.
Then my mother-in-law said I could have it (!!!), which made me absolutely ecstatic, and Wax tolerantly amused by my enthusiasm, but we can't take it home until (a) the giant sofa in terrible condition is removed from the library and (b) MIL's friend with a van has the free time to move it for us (it's both too big for her tiny VW Golf and too heavy for any combination of the 3 of us to move, and local BIL has a bad back from his youthful excesses of Extreme Sports). (Mine doesn't look quite like that one - the lower level is missing - in fact it's exactly like this one that I found at this random blog.)
Wax also explained what it was, since when they told me the name I was understandably confused, as it sounds nothing like other Finnish words related to beds. I was fascinated to discover its cultural stature when I got home and googled it. Its place in history is such that the Finnish National Museum is far from the only museum to house one. Here's one in a pre-war room recreation at the Satakunta Museum in Pori:
Some of the vintage ads refer to hetekas as daybeds (sohvasänky, lit. "sofa bed" in Finnish), but the recent surge in daybed popularity in the interior design world has shown up in Finland with "daybed" translated into Finnish as "sofa bench" instead, presumably in a nod to the recent trend's lack of visible bedclothes (and I'm not entirely clear on whether a heteka is a sofa bench, for that matter).
Since it's much smaller than the sofa, too, there will also be more room in the library for other stuff, which is good because the library is starting to feel a bit crowded with all the giant tupperwares of things that don't fit in our closets.
*Getting rid of the sofa: you can't leave furniture out to be collected at the dumpster or on the curb in Finland - it's illegal (people do it anyway a bit, but not everybody). We've got to take it to the actual town dump and pay them to take it from us if it's too big to sort into a trash receptacle. There are secondhand shops that will pick up old sofas but only if they can resell them; and a lot of sofa vendors will haul the old ones away for free when they deliver a new one; but just getting rid of one is another matter. Either we get it to the dump (it's too big to fit in MIL's car too though - the car BIL used when he gave it to us is no longer in his possession), or we disassemble it into pieces small enough to fit into the dumpsters.
The problem is, it's a really nice sofa, an Asko, with solid bones, a beefy frame of solid wood, and a chaise section that's almost as big as a queen bed (and more comfortable than any bed I've ever owned). Yeah, we still have to get rid of it, because the upholstery's irretrievable and reupholstering it would be way too expensive, and it's also too large for our flat. So we haven't dived in yet, but I anticipate it being harder to take apart than the Ikea and no-name furniture we've hacked to bits in the past.
