Life at Hiiumaa Summerhouse
What is luxury? For us, it has very little to do with how much something costs.
Luxury is waking up to silence. It is having nowhere you need to be. Walking barefoot outside with your first coffee of the morning. Sitting under the pines and noticing that the only thing interrupting the quiet is the sound of birds or the wind moving through the trees.
Luxury is time.
And perhaps that is what we have come to value most about life at Hiiumaa Summerhouse.
Luxury is having less around you
Hiiumaa Summerhouse is tucked away among pines and junipers in Orjaku, a small village on Kassari island.
There are no crowds outside your window. No hotel corridors. No breakfast times to remember.
The house and garden are yours.
You can wake up early or sleep until noon. Have breakfast outside. Read for three hours. Go for a swim. Light the sauna in the middle of the afternoon simply because you feel like it.
Nothing particularly remarkable needs to happen.
And that is exactly the point.
In everyday life, true uninterrupted time has become surprisingly difficult to find.
Here, it comes naturally.
Luxury is walking to dinner
One of our favourite things about the Summerhouse has nothing to do with the house itself. It is what happens when you walk out of the gate.
On a summer evening, you can leave the car where it is and walk through Orjaku towards the harbour to iiUmekk.
Chef Mihkel Heinmets has created the kind of restaurant you might not expect to find in a tiny harbour on an island in the Baltic Sea.
His cooking travels much further than we do on these slow island days. Especially on weekends, flavours and ideas from different cuisines around the world find their way to a table in Orjaku.
But for us, some of the best evenings at iiUmekk are about more than food. You sit down at a table. Mihkel joins you for a while. Someone starts telling a story. You talk about food, the island, travelling, people and life.
Dinner becomes an evening. And several hours later, you simply walk home through the quiet village.
That, to us, feels like luxury.
Luxury is knowing the people around you
There is a difference between staying somewhere and belonging somewhere, even if only for a few days.
Orjaku is a village, not a resort. The harbour is not simply a picturesque backdrop. Local fishermen still use it. Sailing boats arrive. Children learn to sail here. People work, meet, eat and talk.
You may go out early in the morning with a local fisherman to see what the sea has given that day.
Later, you might meet some of the same people at the harbour. By evening, you may be sitting around a table together.
These are small things, but they are increasingly rare when we travel.
The Summerhouse gives you privacy when you want it, but there is also a community just beyond the gate.
You can choose how much of it you want to become part of.
Luxury is an island after everyone else has left
Summer in Hiiumaa is beautiful: long evenings, warm light, boats in the harbours, people on bicycles, restaurants and shops full of life.
But then summer ends and something wonderful happens: the island becomes quiet again.
Autumn and winter in Hiiumaa have a completely different rhythm. The roads empty. The light changes. The sea becomes darker and wilder. Even familiar landscapes suddenly feel different.
This is perhaps when the Summerhouse becomes most itself. There is no pressure to see everything because there is less happening around you and that leaves more time for experiencing what is.
Aa long walk in cold air, Coming home when it is already getting dark, a fire, a hot sauna, dinner that takes the whole evening.
You don’t need summer weather to enjoy an island. Sometimes you need exactly the opposite.
Our kind of luxury
We don’t think luxury always means having more. Sometimes it means having less around you. Fewer people. Fewer plans. Less noise.
And more of the things that are increasingly difficult to find: time, space, silence, nature, good food, real conversations.
Perhaps that is our definition of luxury.
Not having everything, but having enough time to notice what is already around you.
Welcome to our kind of island life.
You don’t have to buy a summerhouse to have a summerhouse.
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