In 1889, Canadian lumber tycoon Arthur Fleming moved to a newly built house at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue. Fleming’s property adjoined those of Adolphus Busch and Thaddeus Lowe on Pasadena’s most fashionable street, overlooking the famed Busch Garden. Fleming’s home was designed by Pasadena’s first professional architect, Frederick Roehrig. The large structure of dark wood with a huge, steeply gabled roof, described as a “Swiss chalet,” is thought to have been one of the first Craftsman-style buildings in Pasadena.

In 1910, Roehrig built a garage for Fleming located at the very back of the property, overlooking the terraced slopes of Busch Garden. In keeping with the architecture of the main house, its most distinctive feature was a wide-sloping roof made of 3-foot-long shingles held down by white rocks.

This vintage Busch Garden postcard shows the Fleming garage in the upper right corner (light brown roof).

Fleming’s residence and nearly every other grand mansion along South Orange Grove were demolished to make way for the apartment and condominium buildings that now line the boulevard. Somehow, the garage survived and was converted to living quarters in 1945. Consul Paloheimo purchased the former garage in 1949. He moved the building to the Fényes Estate, where the interior was remodeled and became a guest house and sauna. The exterior was also altered, with large plate-glass windows replacing the original doors. Paloheimo did much of the stonework and garden work around it himself.

The Fleming garage in its original location before the doors were replaced.

In 1974, the building was again remodeled and dedicated to the Finnish Folk Art Museum. With help from the Finlandia Foundation – an organization Paloheimo co-founded in 1953 to promote the culture of his native country – the building became a museum displaying artifacts typically found in a 19th-century Finnish farmhouse. Today, the Los Angeles chapter of the Finlandia Foundation oversees the presentation of the Finnish Folk Art Museum.

The building design may be Swiss, but the collection is entirely Finnish. The two main rooms house his collection of traditional woodworking, textiles, and other Finnish folk art.

The front room is styled after a “tupa,” the multi-purpose, traditional, communal living space of a family farm, with items assembled primarily from the Ostrobothnian (Pohjanmaa in Finnish) region of western Finland. The back room houses a wide-ranging collection of objects from all over Finland. This authentic exhibition of hand-crafted 19th-century Finnish folk objects is unusual outside Finland.