A visit to Helsinki Design Week in September should be prescribed to anyone feeling bleak about the future of humanity. Each year, as the light and leaves begin to turn, the Finnish capital reminds its population and a growing number of design advocates from elsewhere, how design makes life better. As with any design week, there are requisite furniture launches here too. But the real strength of Helsinki Design Week is its confident and relaxed demonstration of how design spills into everyday life; how it makes for a better urban habitat; how good design improves with age and use; how technology can hold hands with craft; and how long and short-term thinking work together to implement strategy into action.
Every year we return from Helsinki feeling existentially optimistic and wondering if a life amongst the berries and mushrooms, sauna and salmiakki, might in fact be the answer. This is not escape, it’s engagement. Helsinki’s design community is wielded effectively as a tool for improvement by the city in a way that is so refreshing. It’s no surprise to learn that Helsinki is one of the only cities in the world to have a chief design officer.
Instead of forests of press releases on the eve of Helsinki Design Week’s opening, we are pointed to an 84-page strategic planning document, commissioned by the City of Helsinki’s Economic Development Division within the Culture Department. In it, we are introduced to countless interviews with cultural leaders (Finnish and beyond) and international benchmarking analysis, resulting in nine actions for growing the creative sectors proactively and symbiotically with urban development. It’s not rocket science; it’s much more valuable.
One afternoon, taking a dip in the surprisingly temperate Baltic after a sweat in the transcendental Kulttuurisauna, a calm clarity of mind and body emerged, such that it’s almost impossible to master in our torrid times of cluster crisis. People take note: the Finns do it better.
12 uplifting discoveries from Helsinki Design Week 2026
A new brand of summer house
(Image credit: Kainuu)
The Finns love their summer houses or mökki, and Architect Pekka Airaxin launched a new company Kainuu while we were in town, delivering summerhouses made from cross-laminated timber. With Kainuu, Airaxin can bespoke design, ship, construct and deliver turnkey-ready houses for clients. The economic, temporal and stress efficiency of centralising a process that normally spans several parties with ramped-up costs is significant. The environmental boon of CLT, which at Kainuu all comes from managed forests in an 80 km radius from the factory where the timber is processed, is admirable. Kainuu has delivered ten houses already, with 20 in the pipeline. Smart homes indeed.
A properly circular pop-up
(Image credit: Studio Mikko Ryhanen)
Last year we learnt that local architecture behemoths JKMM had won the contract to design the new Architecture & Design Museum in Helsinki, which is scheduled to open its doors in 2030. Until then, a temporary space overlooking the construction site is open for events and gatherings of all scales and flavours. The three-floor building has been designed by Studio Joanna Laajisto with one of the most laudably scrupulous commitments to circularity and reuse that we’ve seen in the interiors industry. Over two decades, Laajisto has worked on sizeable commercial interiors, but felt she needed to put her practice where her mouth was, and use circularity as her definitive lens through which every decision is made. ‘The construction industry is so old-fashioned, we need to unlearn and relearn how we approach what we do,’ Laajisto said. She estimates that 99% of everything in this project is reused, bar the paint and picture frames. Ample proof that beauty is more than skin deep.
Juhanni Pallasmaa’s library
(Image credit: Studio Mikko Ryhanen)
Finnish architect and theorist Juhanni Pallasmaa is a visionary – not a word we use lightly. His seminal work, The Eyes of the Skin (1996), gently held a mirror up to the fallacy of architecture that doesn’t engage the entire sensory realm. Pallasmaa turns 90 this month, and has bequeathed his entire 10,000-strong book collection to Helsinki’s Architecture & Design Museum. At the temporary space, 10% of this collection is on show for reading and reference in a beautiful sitting room area. ‘Have good books around you; they are your best friends,’ Pallasmaa said, rather poignantly.
The Kämp revamp
(Image credit: Hotel Kämp)
Hotel Kämp is Helsinki’s grande dame. Built in 1887, for a century it was a cosy safe haven from the bitterly harsh winter and a soothingly dark friend in the oppressive summer daylight. And then suddenly it felt just a little tired and fusty. A painstaking refurbishment and expansion has been undertaken, and we were spoilt to stay in the new bedrooms on the 8th floor (in the former spa area). All bedrooms have been masterfully designed by Helsinki-based design studio Fyra, who can claim to be shifting the needle on new Nordic interiors. The Kämp’s bedrooms are grown-up in the best sense: comfortable, smart, durable, beautifully lit, money spent cleverly on the materials and details that matter.
Björn Weckström’s villa (and world)
(Image credit: Ari Karttunen)
This summer, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA) opened Villa Weckström on the Espoo archipelago shoreline to the public by appointment for guided tours. Björn Weckström has had an extraordinary life as a jeweller, sculptor and mixed-media artist. Born in 1935, he still practises today and his villa is part-retrospective show, part-peek into the extraordinary mind and hands of the marvellous virtuoso. His jewellery was worn by Princess Leia in the original Star Wars, but it was the words of his wonderful wife Marja-Liisa as she showed us the basement of the house they share that will stay with us: ‘He’s a rather fantastic guy; I’m always surprised by him. Still.’
Ervin Latimer x Finarte
(Image credit: Courtesy Finarte)
Helsinki-based fashion designer Ervin Latimer of Latimmier teamed up with local rug supremos at Finarte to design three hand-knotted and hand-tufted, gloriously saturated, three-dimensionally sculpted rugs. ‘They are inspired by my Afro-Nordic heritage, drawing from textile traditions on both sides of my family, from the Siikajoki Valley in Finland to regions of West and West Central Africa,’ Latimer explains. ‘At the same time, they explore what a contemporary design language might look like for people like me, whose family histories span multiple cultures and whose ancestries are not always easy to trace in detail.’
(Image credit: Courtesy Finarte)
On the power of textiles to hold and tell stories Latimer, also the professor in practice at Aalto University, eloquently expanded: ‘Textiles have an incredible ability to hold stories. They carry them not only through patterns or colours, but through materials, techniques and in the ways they are made and used. After all, much of what we know about past cultures, and what we continue to learn about cultures today, is told through textiles. With this collection, I was interested in textiles as carriers of memory and the past, but also in their ability to create new memories and new futures. When parts of your heritage are impossible to trace, sometimes you have to create a new visual language and, in a way, a new heritage to carry forward.’
Habitare – the fair itself
(Image credit: Courtesy Habitare)
With so much fun in town you’d be forgiven for thinking the fairground might be a damp squib by comparison. Far from it, in fact. Habitare gets better and better, year on year, with ever-more relevant curation and participators that demonstrate the nation’s strength in new material development and quality, enduring craft. In Finland, these mindsets go hand in hand – the mighty Artek is a portmanteau of ‘art’ and ‘technology’ after all. Habitare’s current success lies in its ability to present a serious and rigorous industry facing event that is as warm and accessible for both commercial and cultural audiences, simultaneously. Here are our highlights from this year’s fair.
Minestrone’s wooden temple
(Image credit: Henri Vogt, courtesy Minestrone Workshop)
(Image credit: Henri Vogt, courtesy Minestrone Workshop)
Minestrone Workshop is a collective of nine Helsinki-based designers specialising in material-led, experimental work. And wood. All specialties came together for this pavilion. The task was to create as large a space as possible using as small amount of wood as possible. The reusable frame is clad in a 2mm-thin wood veneer, resulting in 566 cubic metres of space, from just three tree trunks. The space is filled with prototype furniture and lighting made from their workshop materials, in honour of the learning-through-work-in-progress approach of their collective culture.
New Talents
(Image credit: Courtesy Habitare)
(Image credit: Courtesy Habitare)
(Image credit: Courtesy Habitare)
Four new talents are presented each year at Habitare, which always feels refreshingly focused. This year’s crop were notable for their deft skills spanning material, form and narrative. We enjoyed Waltter Mahlberg’s joyful wooden festivities that might be conjured from man’s hands, machine’s motors or computer’s chip. We loved Iina Kettunen’s brooding chainsaw-carved and burnt pine forms. And we were charmed by Carlo Raymann’s naïve fishy forms, fantastical folk objects of devotion from another time.
Wood weaving wonders
(Image credit: Courtesy of Sistem and Niimaar)
A collaboration between interior architecture studio Sistem and circular economy expert Niimaar, has resulted in Tyyne, a series of acoustic panels made from weaving oak strips left over from the manufacture of Finnish Swan sailboats. The oak strips are handwoven in Salo, on Finland’s west coast, while its acoustic performance comes from Aisti Oy’s next-generation acoustic panels, also made from Finnish wood fibre. Tyyne is also available in birch and without the acoustic filling. There is something so exquisitely Finnish about all of this: an interior solution that looks like a work of art, and is healthy in craft, manufacture, function and afterlife.
Extreme carbon negativity
(Image credit: Elementic)
Finnish material technology firm Elementic unveiled MO6 – a carbon tile made from lignin, a by-product of the forestry industry that is usually burned. Elementic claims the carbon tile is the most carbon-negative building material in the world. Transforming the lignin into carbon is a patented process that the team won’t be drawn on, but the resulting material is lightweight, resistant, durable and stores twice the amount of carbon as wood. MO6 was launched as a brand itself at Habitare and tiles already being used in interior design projects in Finland and Europe, with the hope that it will scale and broaden its use imminently.
Furniture for life
(Image credit: Tebian)
Tebian is a small furniture brand, founded by Teppo Lakaniemi in 2011, with studio and showroom in Helsinki and all furniture manufactured in Finland. Tebian today has an extremely covetable collection of beautifully designed and carefully made furniture and home accessories. They are simple, with elegant forms and spare yet confident material use, so as to appear reassuringly robust and charmingly characterful at the same time. Such quality, soulful furniture is a rare find nowadays, where brand and marketing typically stand in the way of form and function, or skill and love. As if to win our hearts yet further, Kia Arpia (Teppo’s partner) baked fresh cinnamon twists for visitors to their stand, veritably drenched in butter with a sprinkling of salt. This is marketing we wholly endorse.
