Honka Brand Guidelines: The Finnish Log-Home Maker Founded by the Saarelainen Brothers

A saw, a planer and three brothers.

Honka is the brand, and Honkarakenne Oyj is the listed company that owns it. Honka is also a Finnish word for pine. The business began in 1958 at Hattuvaara in Lieksa, in eastern Finland, as a sawing and planing shop called Veljekset Saarelainen, or the Saarelainen Brothers. Finnish Wikipedia, drawing on the National Biography and the company’s own histories, says three brothers, Viljo, Arvo and Reino Saarelainen, started it with a field circular saw and a planing machine, and that their idea was the industrial making of log cabins, which was then barely practised in Finland.

The first machine-made round-log villa came in 1963, along with the first villa range of the firm’s own. In 1964 two more brothers, Nestori and Eino, joined, and the firm became Honkatuote Veljekset Saarelainen. It opened a Helsinki sales office in 1965 and built its first show house at Tuusula, north of the capital, in 1966.

The name Honkarakenne came out of a dispute. Growth needed capital, Finnish Wikipedia says, and bringing in outside owners cut the brothers’ share of Honkatuote to a third. As disagreements with the main owners grew, the brothers set up a sales company of their own, Honkarakenne T. Saarelainen & Co. The T stood for their father, Tahvo, because they did not dare put the new firm in their own names. In 1967 Honkarakenne Ky was founded as its parent, and the machine line for round logs received a patent. Honkarakenne became a limited company in 1970.

The brothers then rebuilt round-log production from scratch. It started in 1972 at Karstula, in Central Finland, as Karstulan Honka Oy, in large part because of the interest shown by the municipality; the site was close to good log forest. Export then gave the brothers their way back. A Japanese agent named Fukuda, visiting the Tuusula show area in search of quality suppliers, led to a contract for 250 houses in Japan, and with the advance payment the brothers bought back the majority of Honkatuote and merged the two businesses.

Reino Saarelainen became chief executive in 1976 and stayed until 1994. Honkarakenne joined the Helsinki stock exchange in 1987.

From round logs to non-settling logs.

Export became a large part of the business. Helsingin Sanomat, as cited by Finnish Wikipedia, recorded that about 60 percent of output was exported in 1999, with Germany, Japan, France and the United States as the largest markets, and that the company received the Finnish president’s internationalisation award that year. Honka Japan Inc. dates from 1991, the company says. For the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Honkarakenne built a Finland house at the Concord golf club.

The technical signature is the log. The company’s 2025 timeline lists Honka Fusion in 2003 and calls it the world’s first non-settling CLT log, then dates a plastered Fusion wall structure to 2008; Finnish Wikipedia gives 2008 for the non-settling log. The point of the product, Finnish Wikipedia says, is that installers need not allow for the structure settling. Later entries on the company’s timeline include Honka Timber Frame houses in 2018 and the Honka MultiStorey concept in 2023.

Production has narrowed to one place. All of it was concentrated in Karstula in 2013, and the factory was substantially enlarged in 2014. A company release of May 2025 says all Honka buildings are produced there from certified Finnish solid wood, and that a new line for non-settling CLT logs was commissioned that year.

The design side is credited to named people. Eero Saarelainen, son of the eldest brother, began drawing log houses for the company in the 1960s, mostly with the architect Kari Rainio, Finnish Wikipedia says. It names Anne Mäkinen as chief architect in 2020 and the architect Tuuli Petäjä-Sirén among the designers, and says the industrial designer Harri Koskinen created the Kontti range of small cabins, shown at the Pori housing fair in 2018. Lokki, a villa by the architect Kari Lappalainen, was named Log Building of the Year in 2011. In 2014 the same prize went to the Birgitta café at Hernesaari in Helsinki, for which Honkarakenne supplied the logs.

Recent announcements include larger buildings. In January 2026 the company announced a planned 150-room log hotel at Tornio, which it says would be the largest log hotel built in Finland, and in June 2026 it announced a partnership with OnWood to deliver more than a hundred factory-finished log buildings to Western Europe during autumn 2026 and early 2027.

Factories, show villages and catalogues.

Home builders that work in factories have an unusual problem of presentation. Their product is a house, a thing people expect to see standing on a street, yet much of what makes it distinctive happens indoors, long before anyone arrives on site. So the imagery of the category tends to start at the plant: walls moving along a line, panels stacked by size, roof sections waiting under a gantry. In a brochure, these pictures do the work that a craftsman’s portrait does elsewhere.

The second stage is the arrival. A section of house on a flatbed, a crane lifting a module over a hedge, a timber package unloaded in a clearing: these are the category’s most recognisable photographs. Log and timber makers add their own version, with stacks of numbered logs and yards of drying wood, so that the raw material becomes part of the sales story.

Then comes the place where buyers actually meet the product. Show villages and display parks let a family walk through several finished models in one afternoon, and sales lots do the same job along an American highway. Alongside them sits the catalogue, a storefront that travels by post. Its cover can show a single finished house, and its inside pages turn to cut-away drawings and floor plans, numbered and named like models of car.

That naming habit shapes the graphic side of the category. A plan may carry a code, a series title or a family name, and it has to sit comfortably beside a line drawing, a dimension table and a photograph. The result is a design language closer to a technical manual than a lifestyle magazine, softened by warm wood tones and a little domestic optimism. The guides that follow look at how individual builders have used it, and at the company history behind each one.

The Honka yellow, and the Russian years.

Honka names one colour itself. Its website says “The Honka yellow is the colour of hope and joy for us,” and describes the company’s purpose as bringing the life force of the northern woods into people’s lives. Its copy leans on forest, light and family, and it says it has delivered more than 90,000 buildings to over 50 countries. A 2025 release calls Honkarakenne the world’s best-selling log house brand and the second largest player in the Finnish log industry; those are the company’s words.

Export also took the company into Russia. Finnish Wikipedia, citing a 2023 Helsingin Sanomat investigation, says the firm Rossa Rakenne was set up in 1995 to represent Honkarakenne exclusively in Russia. The magazine Seura reported in December 2021 that the company had been in former Soviet markets since 1995 and had become a favourite of wealthy and influential customers, with about 15 elite holiday villages around Russia. It also reported that the company had long denied a link to the log palace built near Kyiv for Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president until he was removed from office in 2014. English Wikipedia names the main building at the Mezhyhirya residence among Honka’s projects. Seura said the company did not answer its questions about customers in Finland.

That business stopped in 2022. Yle reported on 1 March 2022 that Honkarakenne was suspending sales to Russia because of the situation in Ukraine, and that its chief executive called Russia by far its largest export market. The company had one importer there and no staff or production of its own. Exports were 37 percent of the business in 2021 and 29 percent in 2024, when the company named Scandinavia, Central Europe and Asia as its main export markets.

The founding family remains among the owners. In November 2016 the Russian investment company Sistema Finance made a public cash offer for all the shares; main owner Saarelainen Oy rejected it, and the offer was dropped in January 2017, Finnish Wikipedia says. In a company notice of April 2026, Saarelainen Oy and AKR-Invest Oy appear among the four largest shareholders. Marko Saarelainen, from the founding family, became chief executive in 2015. Magnus Hindström was appointed to succeed him from 3 August 2026, and the company said Saarelainen would return to lead Honka Japan. The company moved its registered home from Tuusula to Karstula in 2016, Finnish Wikipedia says, while its website still places its head office in Tuusula and its factory in Karstula.

For a design guide, Honka shows how one material, one colour and one founding family can hold a brand together through changing export markets. Compare Kontio, another Finnish log-home maker, and Lindal, a North American cedar-home name. For this guide we use a log brown, a pine shade and a northern yellow of our own with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Honka’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.