I overheard a man in our hotel lobby in Helsinki say that he wanted to visit the Hard Rock Cafe to pick up an only-available-there souvenir t-shirt. It’s with the same abject touristic spirit that I visited the Marimekko flagship, hoping to pick up a very cool, very authentic kind of souvenir, one in keeping with the city’s designation as World Design Capital 2012. The store turned out to be off-putting. While the brand’s graphics (like their map of Helsinki) are always charming, that charm just doesn’t always find its way into the products. The store’s two floors were merchandised unimaginatively, with products I’d already seen before, in patterns that were overly familiar, with laughingly expensive prices. Ten American dollars for a plastic change purse? Forty for a glass votive candle holder? The quality of the goods just didn’t justify it. The dresses were shapeless and and the linens were coarse; they didn’t feel luxurious at all.
What really inspired were the Iittala glasses and plates I stumbled across in the housewares section of an unassuming department store further off the main street. Even the simplest pieces here (water glasses, pitchers, cereal bowls) were pristinely shaped and finished, in dreamy, watery hues. A new line of Iittala tableware called Korento by designers Klaus Haapaniemi and Heikki Orvola was graced with a complex flower-and-insect pattern that is very close to sublime. It feels both old-world and contemporary, and definitely Finnish. I stopped and thought, for just a moment, about carrying some place settings home. They would have made an entirely fitting souvenir.