Hirsityö Heikkilä’s excellent wood construction skills are also visible in the Särkänniemi amusement park Doghill Fairytale Farm theme park, where the company built a cowshed, stable and a two-storey granary out of log. The head designer for the theme park was a world leading amusement park designer Bruce D. Brobinson who designed the park based on the Doghill children’s books written by Mauri Kunnas. The log buildings in the theme park were built to match the buildings in the Yli-Kirra Farmhouse museum in Punkalaidun, which Kunnas used as a reference when outlining the 19th century countryside milieu of the Doghill books, as accurately as possible.
Traditionally, the trees used for building new log buildings are logged no later than during the preceding midwinter. The optimal logging time is midwinter when the trees are in a so called “dead stage”. Thus the timber changes its form as little as possible while drying out, and weathering and other logging and storage related challenges can be avoided. When building the Doghill Fairytale Farm theme park, we did not have time to wait until the next winter as the construction had to begin as soon as possible. Therefore, we chose pine snag as our primary material since it is already dry and ready to be used. The pine snags were block-sawed and therefore lack the typical grey surface of snags.
