Postcard from Helsinki Design Week 2025

There were two recurring themes for Helsinki Design Week this year: anniversaries and happiness. The first was an uncanny confluence of almost every person or brand in Finland’s design firmament seemingly celebrating a landmark anniversary – not least Helsinki Design Week itself, which turns 20 this year. Happiness was the subject of the main exhibition for design week, curated by Anniina Koivu, dissecting whether Finland’s designation as the world’s happiest country eight years in a row (according to the annual WEF report) might be attributable to design.

But happiness was to be found beyond Koivu’s exhibition in all nooks and crannies during design week, implicitly and explicitly. As Kari Korkman, founder of Helsinki Design Week said in his opening remarks, ‘I’m yet to meet a designer who is a pessimist, and in these times we are living through, I find it comforting to be surrounded by optimists.’ Amen. And happy birthday Helsinki Design Week – long may you continue showing the rest of the world and industry the positive and meaningful impact of design on life. After four days of berries and mushrooms in the autumn sunshine, here’s ten design highlights we took away from this year’s escapade.

10 highlights from Helsinki Design Week 2025

Habitare - Touch

Founded in 1970, Habitare is the leading furniture, design and interior fair in the Nordics. True to the Finns' greater ingrained appreciation of design as part of life, Habitare is a cultural event, as much as a commercial one. Attendees are more B2C than B2B than other Nordic design fairs, we are told.

This year’s theme was Touch and a striking – moving, even – installation at the heart of the fair by young, local architecture practice Collaboratorio was impressive. Celebrating natural materials, time-honoured techniques and construction methods, the installation was a pavilion made from 40 tonnes of rammed earth bricks that will be used to construct a summer house after the fair. Vast elm tree trunks and roots were positioned outside the pavilion structure, rescued from the construction site of JKMM’s addition to the National Museum of Finland in the city centre. The material exploration was a fascinating, visceral and grounding environment at the heart of a design fair where transience and commerce are dominant.

Habitare Talents

A highlight at Habitare (beyond Finnish stalwarts and personal favourites Nikari and Woodnotes) is the Talents and Protos curated exhibition, profiling emerging designers. Alongside Lennart Engels, who was one of our Material Alchemist exhibitors at Milan this year, we enjoyed the Kaamos lighting of Janne Pärssinen for its industrial, workshop charm; and the characterful language of Anton Mikkonen. Both names we will be keeping our eyes on in the future.

Design Museum announcement

Arguably the pinnacle of the week was the announcement of the winning practice, awarded the contract to design the city’s new Architecture and Design Museum on the Makasiiniranta car park area of the South Harbour. From more than 600 entrants to the anonymous competition, we were introduced to the shortlist of five finalists before the winner was announced. Local firm JKMM are the victors with their design ‘Kumma’, unanimously agreed upon by the jury – and even to attendant laypeople – their design was in a league of its own. Due to open in 2030, it promises to be a landmark home for design in every sense.

Aalto University

Another highlight of Helsinki Design Week is the trip to the Aalto Campus to take in the university’s annual ‘Designs for a Cooler Planet’ show. Aalto does a better job than the majority of other design education establishments at cross-pollinating expertise beyond subject silos, and ensuring business viability is part of the curriculum and agenda. This year we were introduced to fascinating projects including the Marvellous Materials book, encouraging children to experiment creatively with nature’s resources and household bio-waste. Aalto’s junior program counts an astonishing 33,000 students a year, in person and online for camps, courses and learning. Another success story is start-up Reverlast, turning discarded wind turbine blades into floating docks, including the nearby university Siipisauna – which helps prevent around 2.6 tonnes of carbon emissions alone.

Escape to Moominvalley

It’s the 80^th anniversary since Tove Jansson first brought her Moomin universe to life. The Finnish Design Museum is celebrating with a landmark exhibition (opening on 10^th October) that looks at how the architecture in Jansson’s own life inspired the architecture in Moominvalley. One of the core influences was Jansson’s summer island dwelling of Klovharun – a cabin with a sauna built underneath and into the rock on which it sits. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, we were introduced to plans and drawings, including these wonderful sketches by Jansson, which posit her island life firmly in a Moomin-adjacent world.

Escape to Moominvalley opens on 10^th October at the Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki

Finarte 40th anniversary

Eija Rasinmäki founded Finarte, elevating the Finnish rag rug tradition into a design house of great renown over 40 years. Rasinmäki is an astonishingly youthful 80 years old herself, and seemingly as active as ever, today with her daughter Larissa Immonen Sharma as CEO of the company. To celebrate 40 years of rug design and production, Rasinmäki has reintroduced pieces from the archive, and we are particularly taken with the Apollo design shown here.

Yrjö Kukkapuro’s house

We mourned the passing of the maverick Finnish furniture designer Yrjö Kukkapuro back in February, so we were delighted to pay a visit to his studio and see his daughter Isa and granddaughter Ida in full heart. The wonderful former studio and home of Kukkapuro is a parabolic concrete, steel and glass structure just outside Helsinki – stuffed to the brim with the designer’s furniture, books, drawings and a lifetime’s worth of ephemera. The home will be open to the public next year as a house museum. In the meantime, we were introduced to a beautiful new book by Isa, meticulously and imaginatively documenting her father’s legacy called ‘The Blue Door’. We were also shown Kukkapuro’s posthumous new collection of chairs for ‘senior people’ – the YK91 range, manufactured by Alastek.

Harri Koskinen

At Galerie Forsblom, Harri Koskinen’s show of freeform and mould-blown glass works proved to be a powerful and poetic demonstration of the designer’s mastery in the material. Fittingly titled magnitude, the show consists of a series of liquid-like glass monoliths, simultaneously minimal and magnificent in form and presence. We are more familiar with Koskinen’s utilitarian works for Iittala, but his artistic practice reveals a very different side to his skill and imagination, and we are here for it all.

JKMM’s National Museum of Finland extension

With hardhats, high vis, goggles and gloves (strangely) we were ushered around the very tidy and organised building site for JKMM’s ‘Atlas’ extension for the National Museum of Finland, which is set to open in Spring 2027. The original structure was built between 1901-1905 by Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen – the new pavilion appears modest at ground level, but connects underground, adding 1,100 sqm of flexible new exhibition space. Above ground, the modest 600 sqm pavilion has a soaring roof that appears to float on 5-metre high glass walls. The underside of the roof is clad in 5000 handmade ceramic tiles, tessellating in a very pleasing manner. JKMM clearly has a monopoly on cultural projects in Helsinki for good reason.

Aalto mania

Of course no trip to Helsinki or indeed Finland would be complete without a good dose of Aalto, and we headed to the Aalto House and Studio one sunny afternoon to revisit the source of so much of what we know today. It is beautiful and moving as ever – the Finns know how to look after their design legacy in a way that allows it to breathe without suffocatingly heavy handed conservation.

At the spectacularly refurbished Finlandia Hall (designed by Alvar Aalto and originally opened in 1971) there is a beautiful, rigorous and accessible exhibition about the Aaltos in the concert and congress building’s basement. It successfully opens one’s eyes to the human stories of Aino, Alvar and Elissa, while explaining the significance of their collective contribution to design in Finland and beyond. It was fitting that the last stop on our design week journey was at Artek, this year celebrating its 90^th anniversary with a string of gentle launches and reissues, including the charming and ethereal collaboration with Marimekko. We feel Alvar, Aino and Elissa would approve.