Heikki Sormunen, known as “Hesa”, was the caretaker of Ainola during the early years, up until 1916, when he moved to Tohmajärvi to help the family of his brother, who had fallen ill.
According to the memoirs of Ruth Snellman, “Hesa” had helped Aino Sibelius’s mother Elisabet Järnefelt in Vieremä before he came to Ainola. Sormunen lived in the basement of Ainola. He was said to be a philosopher by nature and – like Elisabet and Aino’s brother Arvid – a Tolstoyan by conviction. There was a religious strain in the family, for “Hesa” was the uncle of Eino Sormunen who later became a bishop. The daughters of Jean and Aino Sibelius also remembered “Hesa” as the boisterous Father Christmas of their early years in Ainola.

Sibelius liked to chat with Sormunen. The sauna evenings of the master and the servant could be quite prolonged, when Sibelius sat in his tub and philosophised with Sormunen, who kept adding hot water to the tub at regular intervals. “I’d much rather talk with a plain man like that than with an Edvard Westermarck,” Sibelius said.
Another caretaker of Ainola, well remembered by the occupants, was Usko Siimes, who lived a fairly short walking distance from Ainola and who was in charge of house maintenance from the late 1930s onwards.