48 Hours in Helsinki
Text by Raphael Kadushin
Helsinki enlightens with a love of nature, steamy saunas, bold design, and comfort food.
When Krista Mikkola returned to Helsinki after living in Paris for a few years, she barely recognized her old home-town. Everything had changed. "There was this fresh, vibrant, cosmopolitan energy, and a whole new group of creative people," she says. "Suddenly I felt I was in a town where everyone was communicating, and smiling was no longer forbidden." Mikkola holds court in her eponymous art gallery ("I especially concentrate on the best young Finnish painters"), which sits just south of an area that has become the emblem of a recharged Helsinki. Officially named the Design District, the neighborhood sprawls west of the city's center, and features a bustling scene of galleries, clubs, and boutiques, each showcasing another young new talent.
What makes this urban renaissance such a singularly organic one is the way it has remained true to a purely Finnish aesthetic. Forget the generically updated metropolis flaunting a few designer hotels, some celebrity architecture, and lots of imported cool. Helsinki's style-makers prefer to draw on a profound, native passion for their Nordic landscape: an Eden of dense woods and clean lakes and their indigenous folklore. The resulting blend of the glacially sleek and the soulful emerges all around town. At the trendy Restaurant Ilmatar, named for the Finnish goddess of the wind, tree trunks come encased in glass like priceless heirlooms. At the intimate jewelry shop Claes Nystrom, the necklaces are strung with shim-mering silver leaves. And when the Radisson SAS Seaside Hotel recently opened, it made certain its amenities included not just one but two, all-essential in-house saunas, because the sauna is where the Finns have traditionally come to give birth, to relax, and to creatively think things through. And they've clearly all been sweating it out in the sauna lately. "We've always been a tiny country and a small city with big ambitions," Mikkola says, "but now those ambitions have changed. If the nineties were about Nokia and technology, we are now finally exploring our creative side."
Fast Facts
The largely neoclassical, 19th-century capital city of roughly half a million lies on the southern coast of Finland, ringing a natural harbor of the Gulf of Finland. It's an easy city to navigate&most major attractions are within walking distance&and the Baltic climate is surprisingly gentle; while the average January temperature hovers around 26 degrees (F), that average shoots up to an almost balmy 70 degrees in July.
Don't Miss
Start on the Esplanadi, a long leafy promenade lined with boutiques and cafés lying close to the museum quarter, Helsinki's traditional cultural heart. "I especially like the Helsinki Art Museum," says painter Jani Leinonen, "because it showcases all kinds of artists, from old to young, and a variety of art, from rough to beautiful." The same sensibility informs Kiasma, Helsinki's photography, and installation-happy contemporary art museum, though traditionalists may prefer the paintings at the Ateneum Art Museum. Walk down the Esplanadi to the South Harbour's Market Square, where everything is perfumed by the salty sea breezes. Here, vendors sell furry Lapland hats that look like inverted Ugg boots, and you can grab a picnic lunch at one of the food stalls at the Old Market Hall. Choose something smoked, from reindeer meat to local salmon. Then hop a ferry to Suomenlinna Fortress, an 18th- century complex stretching over six tiny archipelago islands where you can spread out your picnic, or rent a boat and sail around the harbor islands. If you're living the Nordic good life, the most crucial thing is to get back to the city in plenty of time to enjoy a sweaty, cathartic session in the sauna. While every Helsinki native claims a favorite archipelago island, most local purists agree on the sauna of choice. This is the defiantly old-school Kotiharjun Sauna & one of the last of the public, wood-heated saunas where epic-size logs lie in piles next to the blazing furnace. "You can still watch the old railway workers jumping into the pools with their beers," says Leinonen, "and the traditional washing women will give you a scrub. It's all of the people who make this place beautiful."
