Wallpaper* Design Awards: this Finnish island sauna is Life-Enhancer of the Year 2026

Finnish architect and wood aficionado Jaakko Torvinen was sitting in a Helsinki park with a friend one summer evening in 2023 when a man came up to him and asked if he was the designer of the city’s Pikku-Finlandia, a beautifully quirky all-wood space built in 2022 as a temporary replacement to host events while Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall (winner of a Wallpaper* Design Award in 2025) was being restored. Torvinen nodded, and the man told him he had come across the project online that very day. He said, ‘I want you to design a sauna for me,’ and rushed off.

Fast forward two years, and Torvinen has just completed said sauna, a short walk from the client’s summer house on Kaunissaari, an island in the outer Finnish archipelago, four hours by car and ferry from Helsinki. Torvinen had never heard of the island in question before embarking on the project, but he says the pine forests, dramatic boulders and sandy beaches of this former fishing village captured his imagination.

Step inside Puusauna and discover its incredible story

Puusauna, which means wood or tree sauna in English, is a traditional log cabin with intricate dovetail joints, here given a contemporary twist thanks to a handmade zinc roof, large windows, sophisticated wood detailing and treatments, and the use of real trees. The last inhabit both indoor and outdoor spaces, occasionally for aesthetic reasons, but mostly as part of the building’s ingenious structure. ‘In traditional log buildings, the horizontal frame settles as the wood shrinks over time,’ says Torvinen. ‘Here, I separated the roof structure from the log frame so that the roof rests on the upright tree trunks, which won’t shrink, and becomes a sort of canopy.’

Inside, the building is a wood-fired two-storey, or ‘loft’, sauna on one side, and a bright, minimalist tea room, inspired by trips to Japan made by both the client and Torvinen, on the other. From both spaces, there are undisturbed views of the sea, while from the sauna’s upper deck, you feel as if you are sitting amid the canopy of the rare birch forest outside.

The use of whole tree trunks, cut and minimally treated – replete with branches and knobbly bits – as columns is something that had already been explored to great effect in Pikku-Finlandia, but Torvinen (who is also doing a PhD on naturally shaped wood in architecture and design) has taken things one step further here in some cases by using more of the tree to gracefully support a cabinet in the tea room and as a sculptural piece that accompanies the winding staircase upwards in the sauna.

There are numerous other thoughtful handcrafted elements throughout the project. The wall logs in the tea room, for example, were laboriously hand-hewn, leaving unmistakable ‘hit’ marks, while the sauna walls were charred black to create a more intimate space, as well as being a nod to the black interiors of traditional smoke saunas. An oversized bench was made by Torvinen and is complemented by simple wooden stools designed by the Helsinki-based studio Company and manufactured by Finnish brand Nikari. Delicately marbled end-grain tiles, made from a piece of silver birch that had been discarded for structural use due to fungal issues, were used for the tea room floor; its alluring marbled pattern melded well with the scattered granite tiles around the wood-burner.

Also in the tea room are several pieces of furniture by Teppo Lakaniemi, whose Tebian brand specialises in functional-meets-artistic pieces designed by him and manufactured across Finland. The chunky chair by the window, the elegant day bed, the small steps and the side table are all part of existing collections, but the cabinet on the wall and the storage seating box beneath were designed by Lakaniemi, in collaboration with Torvinen, and custom-made for Puusauna.

On the tea room walls are three works by photographer Päivi Tuovinen and three by visual artist Toni R Toivonen, made especially for the project. Toivonen’s powerful and enigmatic pieces are created by setting animal carcasses on brass sheets and allowing the substances released during the rotting process to oxidise the metal. It’s fitting to have these works in this space, says Torvinen, because ‘in the past, saunas in Finland were places where you gave birth but also where dead people were washed and prepared for burial, so they were buildings that witnessed the whole cycle of life’. In Puusauna, functionality meets poetry in the most beguiling of ways.

jaakkotorvinen.com

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today