“The chatter drifting in through the open window and the sound of seagulls wake me from sleep. I open my eyes slightly and notice how the morning sunlight has painted the bedroom walls yellow. For a fraction of a second, I have to think about where I am, until I remember that I’m home. My heart fills with immense gratitude.

It’s a July morning in 2024, and I’m waking up for the first time in our new dream home in Kamppi, Helsinki. I still can’t quite believe that I live here. My partner left the evening before to continue moving things from our flat in Mikkeli, so I get to admire our box-filled home in daylight for the first time, in peace. I rummage through the boxes to find the coffee maker, make myself a morning coffee, sit on the wide kitchen windowsill and look down at our new street and the people passing by.

I spent my entire childhood in a remote area, and I’ve never lived in a home where you can see and hear life through the windows. You might imagine that someone who has lived their whole life surrounded by forest would love silence and peace – but for some reason, the bustle of the city calms me.”

I’ve always been a slightly restless soul, craving change and variety around me. I remember as a child rearranging my room so often that I eventually crafted scale-model furniture and a floor plan to help me visualise new layouts.

A new arrangement always felt like a fresh start.

That love for new beginnings is still part of my life today – just on a slightly differenr scale. My partner and I have been together for ten years, and during that time we’ve had six shared homes in two different cities.

Many people probably hate moving, but I love it – that moment when the old door closes and a new one opens. Empty rooms, countless possibilities, new routines, and the feeling that everything can begin again with a clean slate.

We’re both originally from Mikkeli, but over the past four years we’ve been moving back and forth between Helsinki and Mikkeli, sometimes renting and sometimes living in a home we owned. It feels as though in our society, owning a home is still seen as a certain measure of adulthood and a sign of having ‘made it’ in life – that by a certain age, you should settle down, buy a home and perhaps stay there for the rest of your life.

We like to do things a little differently, and perhaps we even enjoy that small sense of uncertainty when everything hasn’t been decided in advance. We believe that home always travels with us, wherever life takes us.

Many people probably thought we’d lost our minds when we moved to Helsinki on a whim, then moved back to Mikkeli, and eventually moved to Helsinki again. And from the outside, there may not have been much logic to it – but for us, those moves were simply life: trusting our feelings and listening to them. Life doesn’t move in a straight line, and it doesn’t have to.

Right now, renting suits us perfectly. I love the freedom and flexibility that renting brings – the feeling that life is allowed to move and change if it wants to. That you’re allowed to change your mind and your direction.

At the moment, I’m also hugely enjoying living right in the centre of Helsinki, where all the services, shops, cafés and restaurants are just around the corner.

It’s also wonderfully carefree not having to worry about maintenance or repairs ourselves, as Lumo Homes takes care of everything. For example, when our dishwasher broke down a few months ago, all it took was one message to Lumo, and the issue was already being dealt with. I’m sure that one day we’ll want to buy a more permanent home too, but for this stage of life, a rented home suits us more than well.

At the beginning of every year, I make a vision board for myself, visualising the things I want to manifest in my life during the year ahead. At the start of 2024, I wrote a Helsinki postcode on my vision board. At the time, moving to Helsinki wasn’t on the cards at all – we had bought our flat in Mikkeli only a year and a half earlier. But for some reason, my heart was pulling strongly towards Helsinki.

I searched Pinterest for images to match my vision board, showing what our new home would look like: herringbone parquet flooring, decorative mouldings, wide windowsills, a cream-coloured kitchen, an old apartment building in central Helsinki, and ceilings several metres high.

A few months later, I received a call from Lumo Homes – they had an apartment becoming available that matched our criteria perfectly. I had previously filled in an open application on Lumo’s website, where I’d listed some of these features of our dream home. I received a link to photos of the apartment on my phone and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as if the flat had been taken straight from my vision board.

Coincidence or not, I took it as a strong sign from the universe that we were meant to move back to Helsinki – and that this would be our new home.