Palm House (Palmimaja), Tallinn Botanic Garden

Tallinn Botanic Garden was founded on 1 December 1961 as an institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR, in the old valley of the River Pirita on land that had once belonged to Konstantin Päts, Estonia's first president. Its glasshouse collections opened to visitors in 1971, and the garden passed to the city of Tallinn in 1995.

The Palmimaja, or Palm House, was completed in 1999 to designs by Vilen Künnapu and Ain Padrik, partners since 1991 and leading figures of the postmodern 'Tallinn School'. The building was among the nominees for best glass-and-concrete building of the year. In 2008 the city began a second, adjoining glasshouse to replace three worn-out houses dating from 1971.

Two decades of use exposed the Palm House's weaknesses: a leaking roof, water damage, cracked concrete, corroded metal and severe heat loss. The reconstruction announced in 2018 stripped the building back to its load-bearing frame, which was still judged sound, and gave it an entirely new envelope. Carried out by Ehitus5ECO to an engineering design by Infragate, with AVAB responsible for the interior architecture, the work cost around €2.2 million. The Palm House formally reopened on 8 June 2021.

The Palm House is dominated by a glazed tower, and the building pairs glass with concrete in a composition typical of Künnapu and Padrik's postmodern vocabulary. The renovation project covers a net floor area of about 2,178 m² on two levels.

The rebuild focused on curing the original technical flaws. The tower's glass façade was replaced with better-insulating glazing, heating and ventilation were rebuilt, and automatic vents now respond to temperature, wind and rain. Condensation control, critical in a building with very high humidity, was redesigned, and grow lamps help the plants through the light-starved Baltic winter. The café was enlarged over two levels, part of it suspended above the palm hall.

The garden's glasshouses offer about 2,000 m² of usable space and some 2,000 plants, arranged by climate zone. The palm hall gathers palms, bananas and tropical crop plants such as coffee and papaya; other areas hold cacti and succulents, subtropical species including eucalyptus and camellias, and Mediterranean flora.

Orchids have a special place: the garden grows several hundred species, and every March the Palm House hosts an orchid show that has now run for more than twenty-five years.

The botanic garden lies about ten kilometres east of central Tallinn in the wooded Pirita valley, not far from the TV Tower. The Palm House is the natural starting point, especially in winter; in the warmer months it pairs well with the rose garden, the arboretum and the waymarked trails, including a botanical path of almost four kilometres. Allow an hour for the glasshouses and half a day with the outdoor collections. March, when the orchid show is on, is a particularly good time to come.