Photo via Pexels. A general glassblowing scene, not a photo taken at the Iittala factory.
Walk into almost any Finnish home and you will find it within a minute. A wavy glass vase on the windowsill. A stack of plain, sturdy plates in the kitchen cupboard. A tumbler with a pattern that looks like melting ice. A small glass bird on a bookshelf. All of them carry the same little red-and-white “i” sticker, and most Finns could name the designer of each without turning the piece over.
That sticker belongs to Iittala, a glassworks founded in a small village in southern Finland in 1881 that grew into one of the most recognisable names in Nordic design. Its story runs through Alvar Aalto, Kaj Franck, Tapio Wirkkala and Oiva Toikka, and it explains a lot about how Finland came to think of good design as an everyday right rather than a luxury.
From a Village Glassworks to a National Brand
Iittala began as a modest glass factory in the village of the same name, about 20 kilometres from Hämeenlinna and roughly an hour and a half north of Helsinki by road. Its founder, Petrus Magnus Abrahamsson, was a Swede who had worked at the older Nuutajärvi glassworks, and early production was the usual mix for a rural Nordic factory: bottles, window glass and simple tableware, often copied from Swedish and Central European patterns.
For its first half-century Iittala was not especially famous. That changed in the 1930s, when Finnish glassworks started running design competitions to find a distinctly Finnish style. The newly independent country, which had only broken away from Russia in 1917, was keen to show the world that it had a modern identity of its own, and glass, ceramics and textiles turned out to be some of the best ways to do it.
The Aalto Vase: The Piece That Changed Everything
In 1936 Alvar Aalto entered a competition run by the Karhula-Iittala glassworks with a set of free-form designs. The best known of them became the Aalto vase, sometimes called the Savoy vase after the Helsinki restaurant that ordered it for its tables. It was shown at the 1937 Paris World Exposition and has been in production ever since.
The shape is the point. Where most vases of the time were symmetrical, Aalto’s walls curve in and out like a lake shoreline seen from above, and no two sections of the rim are the same. People have read it as a Finnish lake, an Inuit woman’s leather trousers (Aalto’s own working title was reportedly along those lines) or simply a sketch that refused to be tidied up. Whatever the inspiration, it captured the organic, nature-led side of Finnish modernism that runs through Aalto’s buildings too.
The vase is still mouth-blown at the Iittala factory, using wooden and metal moulds, and each one passes through the hands of a team of glassblowers. That is a large part of why it has stayed expensive, and a large part of why people keep buying it.
Kaj Franck and the Idea of “Anonymous” Design
If Aalto gave Iittala its icon, Kaj Franck gave it its philosophy. Franck, often called “the conscience of Finnish design”, believed household objects should be cheap enough for everyone, tough enough for daily life and simple enough that they never went out of fashion. He disliked the idea of the designer as a celebrity and wanted his work to feel almost anonymous.
His most famous result is the tableware now sold as Teema. It began life in the early 1950s as Kilta, made by the Arabia ceramics factory in Helsinki: a set of plates, bowls and cups built from a few basic shapes (circle, square, rectangle), sold individually so that families could mix colours and add pieces as they could afford them. Kilta was reworked and relaunched as Teema in 1981, and it remains one of the best-selling ranges in the group. Franck also designed Kartio (1956), a set of plain, cone-shaped tumblers and carafes that still look modern in a way that a lot of 1950s glassware does not.
Franck’s thinking connects to a wider Nordic idea you will also find in Danish design and Sweden’s lagom: that well-made things should be part of ordinary life, not locked in a display cabinet.
Tapio Wirkkala, Timo Sarpaneva and the Golden Age
The 1950s and 1960s were Finnish design’s golden age, and Iittala was at the centre of it. Two designers in particular defined the period.
Tapio Wirkkala
Wirkkala was a sculptor as much as a designer, and his glass often looks like it came out of the landscape. His best-known Iittala range is Ultima Thule (1968), a set of glasses and bowls whose surface imitates dripping, melting ice from Lapland. It is widely reported to have been designed with Finnair’s new transatlantic service in mind, and the airline used it on board for years. Today it is one of the most popular wedding-list items in Finland.
Timo Sarpaneva
Sarpaneva designed art glass, cast-iron cookware and, in 1956, the little round “i” logo that still appears on every Iittala product. It was created for his i-line glassware and became the company’s identity almost by accident. Sarpaneva and Wirkkala both won major prizes at the Milan Triennale in the 1950s, which helped make “Finnish glass” a byword for modern design across Europe and North America.
Oiva Toikka and the Birds
Oiva Toikka brought colour and humour to what had become a rather serious design tradition. He designed Kastehelmi (“dewdrop”) in 1964, a pressed-glass range covered in tiny raised beads that was originally a clever way to hide the seams left by the moulds. It was discontinued for a while and then reissued, and it is now one of Iittala’s most recognisable patterns.
Toikka’s real legacy, though, is the Birds by Toikka. He began making mouth-blown glass birds in the early 1970s at the Nuutajärvi glassworks, and over the following decades produced several hundred different species, real and imaginary. Some are made in large numbers; others are annual or limited editions released in tiny runs. They have a devoted collector community, with rare birds changing hands for far more than their original price. Toikka died in 2019, but the birds are still made to his designs.
Who Owns Iittala Today?
The corporate history is tangled. Iittala was owned for much of the 20th century by the industrial group Ahlström, merged with Nuutajärvi in the late 1980s, and through a series of deals in the 1990s and 2000s gathered other Finnish and Nordic brands under one roof, including the Arabia ceramics factory and the Swedish glassworks Rörstrand. In 2007 the whole Iittala group was bought by Fiskars, the Finnish company best known for its orange-handled scissors and one of the oldest firms in the country.
Not everything is still made in Finland. Arabia’s historic Helsinki factory stopped producing ceramics in 2016, and much of the tableware is now made abroad. The mouth-blown glass, however, including the Aalto vase and the Toikka birds, is still produced in Finland, mainly at the Iittala factory itself. That mix of Finnish craft and global manufacturing is typical of Nordic design brands today, as our profile of Marimekko also shows.
Visiting the Iittala Glass Factory
If you are travelling in Finland, the village of Iittala makes an easy and rewarding day trip from Helsinki or Tampere. The main attractions are:
- The glass factory. You can watch glassblowers at work from a visitor gallery overlooking the hot shop. Entry to watch has traditionally been free, and guided tours are available.
- The Iittala Glass Museum. A small museum tracing the factory’s history from the late 19th century to today, with prototypes, art glass and design classics. There is a modest entry fee.
- The outlet shop. The factory shop sells Iittala, Arabia and Fiskars products, including seconds at lower prices. It is one of the best places in Finland to buy a piece of Finnish design to take home.
- Iittala Village. The old factory area has small galleries, craft studios and cafés, which are busiest in summer.
Trains run from Helsinki to Hämeenlinna in about an hour, and local trains and buses connect to Iittala in around 15 minutes. By car it is a short detour from the main Helsinki–Tampere motorway. Opening hours change by season, so check the official Iittala or Visit Hämeenlinna websites before you go.
Back in Helsinki, the Design Museum has a strong collection of Finnish glass, and the Iittala & Arabia Design Centre in the old Arabia district is worth a look too. Our Helsinki city guide covers the Design District, where you will find the brand’s flagship shops alongside dozens of independent studios.
Why Iittala Still Matters
Plenty of design brands sell nostalgia. Iittala’s trick is that many of its classics were designed to be used, not admired, and Finns really do use them. Teema plates go in the dishwasher every day, Kartio tumblers get passed down to the next generation, and an Aalto vase is still one of the most common wedding presents in the country. The same ideas show up in Finnish architecture, in the Finnish companies that build things to last and in the plain, practical feel of a Finnish mökki or sauna.
If you want one object that sums up Finnish design, it would be hard to beat an Iittala piece: made from sand and fire, shaped by a famous designer and meant to be used every day. For more on the people and brands behind Nordic style, read our profiles of Fritz Hansen, Louis Poulsen and Moomin, whose characters appear on the best-known Arabia mugs, or browse the Nordic interior design trends for 2026.
