Trickster Magazine

As a Finn who grew up in Estonia, the Finnish design scene always seemed more exciting and elaborate than the one surrounding myself. Compared to our applied arts heritage, which has been greatly influenced by the Soviet era, Finland has a long rooted, uninterrupted, and frankly quite an embodied history of design. And there’s great things happening in the local scene – young makers are challenging the notions of crafts and technology, questioning form and function, and boldly experimenting with materiality. Collectibles have become a thing and though more and more of these works are presented in gallery spaces, most of them are created in shared workshops, in a tight-knit community of creatives. Hereby an overview of 10 brands and designers to watch out for, not in order of preference, rather as a linear narrative from jewellery to wooden furniture, spanning smaller makers, community initiatives and heritage brands.

Ornamented collectibles that focus on storytelling get me. So did Santeri Mortti, one of the Habitare Talents of 2025, who presented the Ulpukka bookshelf with a flower growing out of its structure, among other pieces. It was hard to walk past his work without smiling.

Combining sculpture and function, the approach of Mortti is rooted in craft and material. His fascination with wood goes back to his childhood and summers spent at the cottage with a carpenter dad. But it took a while to venture back to wood, in between he experimented greatly with embroidery and textiles, developing a visual language that is present in his works despite the materiality. This playfulness and a certain ease in making are the basis of anything he does.

Reeta Laine is a product designer based in Tampere, who balances the visual with the practical. In her work, framing and compositions are as important as form and colour combinations. This becomes evident in many of her pieces, her language is clear and curated through the smallest details.

Although her portfolio is full of beautiful product designs spanning from small vessels,  containers and candle holders to chairs and side tables, my favourite piece is still the Blom Mobile, so utterly simple yet mesmerizing in its shape and movement.

One of the Habitare Talents of 2025, Lennart Engels is a designer focusing on material innovation and sculptural object-making. Currently, he is making the headlines with sauna stones, more precisely, small objects of ritual made from a geopolymer based on recycled sauna stones, collected from various communal saunas in Helsinki. What started as a graduation project from Aalto University has turned into a company, Sauna Stone Lab, transforming the most common ritual of a Finn into a candle holder, a doorknob or other.

But what initially caught my attention was his series of 3D-printed vessels, which explored ornamentation as a natural outcome of manufacturing processes, and questioned the relations between the maker, the machine and the material. Engels continuously pushes the borders of material research and is currently experimenting with 3D-printing with geopolymers, creating an aesthetic that is guided by the dialogue between the machine and the material, resulting in a visual language and structure that could not be achieved with traditional extrusion printing methods.

When I first discovered Helsinki Playground, the name and the logo really misplaced me, but upon closer inspection I found one of my current favourite spaces to follow in order to keep up to date with what’s happening in the local scene. Gathering the coolest creatives from near and far, Helsinki Playground connects people and cultures, as the name so refers to. They host various events – exhibitions, craft markets, pop-up stores, workshops, brand collaborations and gatherings – with a playful approach, shining the spotlight to makers and creatives active in the scene.

What I find especially cool about them is their community badge which is ‘awarded’ to people and practices who, like Helsinki Playground themselves, focus on bringing people together. Among others, this has been given to Barra, a pop-up breakfast club hosted by three local chefs and food creatives, Emma Ranne, Louisa Adje and Dmitry Anatolev. To my experience, which spans the design scenes of five countries I have resided in, it’s only in Helsinki that the creative scene is brought together with so much joy.

Helsinki Playground is initiated and run by Adam Tickle, with the help of the local community.

Born from a dream to bring together people from different creative fields and backgrounds, Anniina Dunder-Berg, Piia Jalkanen and Päivi Keski-Pomppu founded Studio Bom, a creative collective based in the Kallio district in Helsinki. In the serene shared studio, arts, crafts and design coexist both individually and collectively.

The space is set up to host personal studios, shared working areas, tools and a ceramics kiln. A collective kitchen bridges the workshop side with a gallery, where various exhibitions and events take place throughout the year. Imagine a long dinner table surrounded by unique chairs and benches, covered with plates and glasses and vases, all from local makers and designers—that’s how I first discovered them, and I was mesmerised!

Currently, Studio Bom is shared by nine creatives from various fields: Anna Pirkola, Anniina Dunder-Berg, Charlotta Munsterhjelm, Joel Sipilä, Kirsi Enkovaara, Pietu Arvola, Piia Jalkanen, Päivi Keski-Pomppu and Riikka Piippo.

Riikka Piippo is a ceramic artist and designer whose work bridges the timeless and the contemporary. Led by material agency and dedication to traditional handbuilding techniques, her work is delicate and captivating. Leafy motifs are wrapped around archetypal vessel forms dating back to different cultures and historical periods, making you stop in your tracks and sharpen your gaze – is this really a piece from today? They could equally date back to Roman times, or fight against modernism and the loss of unnecessary decoration.

I initially found out about her work during Helsinki Design Week in 2024, at the “Re-think, re-form” exhibition at Studio BOM, and was immediately drawn to the simple shaped yet beautifully detailed vases. In an era where many ceramics are focused on bold colours and minimal shapes nearly imitating plastic, her ornamental vessels are a gentle breath of fresh air.

There’s another community workspace worth mentioning, which is located in Vallila, north of Helsinki. Inside a courtyard, a small staircase leads you up to a loading deck, and inside, pockets of workshop spaces open up, with heavy-duty woodworking machines side by side with beautiful collectibles, both in process and finalised pieces, made from local timber. Minestrone Workshop is a shared workspace founded by 9 friends – designers and artists – who actively share the space amongst themselves, as well as with the larger community of Helsinki, through open studios, soup dinners and breakfast bars.

Minestrone mixes up traditional woodworking approaches with uncommon aesthetics for objects, furniture and spaces, creating unique pieces that speak of contemporary craftsmanship and contribute to the quietly rising discourse of collectible design.

Current members of Minestrone studio are Anton Mikkonen, Carlo Raymann, Didi NG Wing Yin, Eevi Hautanen, Emilia Lonka, Hemmo Honkonen, Noora Katajalaakso, Paul Flanders and Tatu Laakso, and each one of them is worth keeping an eye on!

For a more sculptural take on wood, it’s worth having a look at the work of the artist and designer Heli Juuti. Heli's approach to material is very delicate and intuitive, where with only a set of traditional hand carving tools she shapes and reworks various pieces of salvaged wood, following the grain as well as the texture and surface of each piece. Found and received oak logs and juniper branches, foraged driftwood from the beach as well as strangely cut leftovers from the workshop are masterfully combined into beautiful organic sculptures that take you into dreamlands.

Her works tell stories of mythology and the spiritual connections to nature, and hold historical references to vernacular objects, folk art and sacral architecture, particularly to the neo-gothic wooden interiors they preserve. Yet she manages to find an intriguing balance between visually modern and aged, making you question whether the piece is inherited from a great grandfather or in fact, made in her beautiful studio in Lapinlahti, Helsinki.

Moving to bigger brands in the game, Vaarnii is a wooden furniture producer with a funky twist. Working mainly with Finnish pine wood with honesty and pride, their designs are robust and clear, bold and heavy, celebrating the characteristics of the material. Straight lines and simple shapes intended to serve generations.

Inspired by log houses, rustic objects, and unorthodox making, Vaarnii is pushing on the Finnish vernacular aesthetics as they collaborate both with local craftspeople as well as global designers, who each show their take on pine wood. A material deemed less favoured in design is returned to the scene and frankly, celebrated.

In addition to their products, their campaign productions have been very captivating, and they have included some of the abovementioned names in the styling as well. Bigger brands giving light to upcoming designers always warms my heart. More of this, please!

I might be biased, and although left last on the list, the first brand that always comes to mind when thinking of Finnish design is Artek. The company was established in 1935 by four visionaries and idealists – Alvar & Aino Aalto, Maire Gullichshen and Nils Gustav Hahl – and continues to be relevant today, as they celebrate their 90th anniversary.

Artek furniture is known to every Finn, their products are used from domestic interiors to kindergartens and larger institutions, which goes to show the universality of the designs. What looks like a simple wooden stool at first glance is actually a local take on the bent tubular furniture of early modernism. Alvar Aalto was seeking alternative materials to steel, in order to design furniture for his buildings, and together with Otto Korhonen, they invented a technique to bend solid Finnish birch. The result is a company combining art and technology, and experimenting with woodbending since 1935.