This year’s annual staff trip took us to Helsinki, a pretty seaside capital famed for its design heritage, rich architectural offering and the odd sauna or two.
The team arrived in the Finnish capital a little discombobulated by a two-hour time zone leap and the near around-the-clock sunlight – a novelty that didn’t entirely wear off.
We headed straight to Sea Horse – a stalwart of Helsinki’s restaurant scene since 1934 – for an initiation into traditional Finnish cuisine. If, like us, you hitherto haven’t been acquainted with the country’s fare, a mash-up of Russian and Nordic influences goes someway to describing what’s on offer: herring (lots of it), stuffed cabbage, pike, vorschmack and a healthy amount of dill.
Our accommodation for the trip was the newly appointed Hotel St. George, which occupies a former newspaper printing house in the city centre. The Scandi-inflected interiors are enlivened by a partnership with the Helsinki Art Museum and the National Gallery, with pieces like the only work by Ai Weiwei to be publicly exhibited on display. We dropped off our bags and headed out for a nightcap.
After a late night that may or may not have ended up with karaoke, we woke up bright and early to head to the home and studio of mid-century heavyweight Alvar Aalto.
Concealed in the leafy neighbourhood of Munkkiniemi, Aalto’s house, which was finished in 1936, is an intimate space that seamlessly fuses Modernist and Functionalist schools of architecture with influences that span Japanese spatial arrangements and the traditional Finnish vernacular.
The result is a comprehensive and holistic expression of Aalto’s personal style, a compliment he would have no doubt been flattered by given his career-long strive to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which he wanted to design buildings and everything in them, from furniture to textiles.
Aalto’s home, which originally doubled as his studio, quickly ran out of desk space for his practice, and so a new space was completed a short stroll away in 1955. The white-rendered brick structure is more overtly Modernist than Aalto’s house, but also embodies the attention-to-detail approach to comprise a light-filled, textured and spatially-varied space.
With our architecture fix well and truly had, we headed into town, braved the foreboding grey skies and plucked up the courage for a dip in the Allas Sea Pools. With one of the pools being fed directly with nippy Baltic sea water, we decamped to the sauna for the ultimate team-bonding experience – what breeds camaraderie quite like semi-nudity and whacking one another with birch branches?
Two splinter groups formed after a light lunch, with the lazier among us heading to design store Artek – established by Aalto et al – for a leisurely afternoon spent fawning over design pieces. The more cultured contingent headed to the Temppeliaukio Church, a monumental church forged from solid rock that was designed by Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen and completed in 1969.
After a nap, an aperitivo and a short walk, we arrived at Ateljé Finne, formerly the studio of sculptor Johan Gunnar Finne and now a fine-dining restaurant. We settled in for dishes like steak tartare, braised lamb belly and roasted turnips, washed down with lashings of Sancerre.
A rendezvous with a smaller-than-expected ferry got us out by mid-morning and while a few of us didn’t manage to find our sea legs, we arrived at Didrichsen Art Museum on the island of Kuusisaari an hour later largely untraumatised. The former private house of Marie-Louise and Gunnar Didrichsen was designed by Finish architect Viljo Revell first in 1958 and then in 1960, when it was extended.
Today the house continues to host the museum the pair set up in 1965 to display their eclectic art collection, which includes works by Finns such as Gallen-Kallela, Schjerfbeck, Särestöniemi and Linnovaara, as well as international names such as Picasso, Kandinsky, Miró, Léger, Moore, Giacometti and Arp.
With our itinerary wrapped up, all that was left to do was head to the airport, where we departed having been thoroughly endeared both to Helsinki and each other.