It was her brother Armas who brought his friend and fellow student, Jean Sibelius, to the family home in the winter of 1889.

The Sibelius family moved there in the autumn of 1904, having borrowed a substantial amount of money to buy the land and build the house.

Margareta was born in 1908, then Heidi in 1911 (when Aino was 40 years old), and the children all grew up in Ainola – the only time they lived elsewhere was during the Finnish Civil War in 1918 when they had to move to Helsinki for a couple of months.

During the next few years they spent some time in a rented apartment in Helsinki, but in 1941 they moved back to Ainola with their many grandchildren because of the risk of bombing by the Soviet Union.

Aino continued to live in Ainola after his death; she sorted out family papers and helped Santeri Levas and Erik W. Tawaststjerna who were writing biographies of her late husband.

In 1972 Jean Sibelius's daughters, Eva, Ruth, Katarina, Margareta, and Heidi, sold Ainola to the Finnish State and it was opened to the public as a museum in 1974.