No convention centre, no wristband, no single venue. Helsinki Design Week takes over the city centre from 28 August to 6 September, and this year’s theme is vastaantulija, the oncoming other. The people you pass, the encounters you didn’t plan.

It’s a good theme for this city, because Finnish design is about far more than objects. It’s the library you can sit in all day, the swimming halls anyone can use, and the sauna in the basement of an ordinary apartment block, which is treated as basic infrastructure rather than a luxury. Design here is often a question about who or what a space is for.

We’re an official accommodation partner this year of Helsinki Design Week, with a campaign rate at four of our Helsinki buildings: Kamppi, Kaarti, Ullanlinna and Katajanokka. Details at the bottom.

We’re glad to be part of it, because we’ve spent a while thinking about the same thing: how to create a building worth being awake in, not just asleep.

Open Studios runs 28 August to 4 September. Design Market takes over the Cable Factory on 29 and 30 August. HDW Meeting Points are dotted across the centre for the full ten days, and from 2 to 4 September, Design Diplomacy puts designers in conversation inside private homes and embassies, which is exactly as good as it sounds.

It’s ten of the best days of the year to be here. It’s also a fair reflection of the rest of them, because the studios and workshops behind this are working the other 355 too.

The building went up in 1970 as offices: inner courtyard, roof terrace, 360 degrees of Helsinki, and, for a stretch of years, nobody in any of it.

Now, Bob W Kamppi holds 99 apartments, and the roof terrace tops it off.

Keeping the building standing rather than knocking it down cut around 70% of the emissions of a new build. Avarrus Architects handled the unglamorous parts: windows, HVAC, solar, a restored fireplace, and a much longer list nobody photographs.

Onto the roof. The Sauna Lounge by Iittala and Bob W is a proper Finnish sauna – hot enough to send you out onto the terrace, repeatedly. Iittala glass throughout, Aalto and Wirkkala next to the new Solare range. The furniture is by Vaarnii: Finnish pine, nothing else.

KOKO3’s Mari Relander told Monocle why that matters: guests come up hot, barefoot, dripping. The pine doesn’t mind. It gets better.

Between us: you don’t have to be staying here to book the sauna.

The Hotel Rivoli Jardin opened here in 1984, built by Ragni Rissanen, who Finnish hospitality called the Grand Old Lady for good reason. Forty years on, it was due an update, though a good deal of that meant restoring rather than replacing.

The original brass lights came down, were stripped and reconditioned, and went back up where they started. The 1980s rattan chairs went to Verhoomo Wiik, a family firm who also restore the furniture in the Finnish Parliament House, and came back better than they left. Ragni chose a very particular green. We kept it.

55 studios and suites now, designed with KOKO3: a social kitchen, a washateria, a sauna, and an interior winter garden. Ragni would approve.

The furniture and fittings in Bob W properties came from people over catalogues, and a few are worth knowing.

Annala, in Lapua, is the last working upholstery fabric mill in Finland. Fourth-generation weaver Hanna-Maria Kortesoja runs it, and they wove the seat and chair fabrics in Kaarti and Kamppi to a pattern KOKO3 drew for us. ikimakee handmake every sofa in their Vantaa workshop, modular, and re-coverable, so it can change its mind about being beige without going to landfill. Finarte hand-tufted the jade wool rug at Kaarti in Kotka. Niimaar made the recycling units, designed by Harri Koskinen, on the radical premise that bins can be nice to look at.

And Tero Kuitunen made the coffee cups at Kamppi, in colours and shapes you wouldn’t have thought to ask for, because 7am also deserves a bit of joy.

MyHelsinki has built three routes for the campaign: 72 hours of design, art, and architecture, 72 hours at the heart of design, and 72 hours of urban Helsinki beyond the mainstream. Each one is a full three days, and between them they cover most of what’s worth seeing.

Their Design District guide puts Bob W Kaarti proudly under where to stay. Kamppi sits a little west, among the studios and gig venues, with the sauna to round off the day.

Take whichever suits how you want to move through the week. 
Löydä oma design, after all.

DESIGNHELSINKI26 gets you 15% off two nights or more at Bob W Kamppi, Kaarti, Ullanlinna, and Katajanokka. Bookings open 17 August and close 13 September. Stay any time up to 31 October.

Bob will see you there!