Qwensel House
A gentry family’s town residence on the Lords’ Corner
Qwensel is an old manor house named after its first known owner, Wilhelm Johan Qwensel. Qwensel came to Turku from Stockholm to work at the Court of Appeal and bought the plot of land on the west bank of the Aura River in 1695.
The area of the Herrainkulma, or the Lords’ Corner, was saved from the fire in Turku in 1827 and began to be called the Fortuna quarter, the quarter favoured by fortune. The very next year, 1828, the house was bought by the merchant shipowner Nils Friedrich Tjäder and became a merchant house. Tjäder converted the annex built by the previous owner into a commercial building, which was used for trading activities in the following decades. The pharmacy museum is now housed in the annex built by Tjäder. The site was located in an area known as the ‘Lords’ Corner’, as the area had been zoned by Peter Brahe for court of appeal officials, county executives and nobles. The dwellings and outbuildings in their original locations give the impression of a grand Turku home from the days of subsistence farming. The house is one of the best-preserved manor houses of the period in the Nordic countries.
In the Pipping era
One of the most famous owners of the house was the medical professor Joseph Gustav Pipping, who lived here from 1789 to 1815. Pipping was Finland’s first professor of surgery and was ennobled as Pippingsköld in 1812 for his medical merits.
Pipping renovated the house in the Rococo and Gustavian style, which was the fashion at the time. The present interior of the house reflects the period when Pipping and his family lived there.