Aino Aalto: Pioneering Finnish Architect and Designer
Tekla and Artek celebrate architect and pioneering designer Aino Aalto with an exclusive collection released in the year of her 130th birthday. The collection comprises bedding featuring Aino Aalto’s Kirsikankukka pattern, highlighting Tekla and Artek’s shared commitment to timeless, high-quality pieces that centre “the beauty of the everyday”.
Aino Marsio Aalto was a Finnish architect, designer and co-founder of the design company Artek. Aino played a crucial role in establishing Artek’s distinct style, placing an emphasis on textiles and natural materials, which influences modern design to this day. Despite the indelible mark left by Aino, only in recent years has the depth and diversity of her talents received due recognition.
Highlighting these talents has been central to this collection, as Tekla and Artek place a spotlight on Aino’s contribution to Artek and her wider design legacy.
Alvar Aalto Museum © Alvar Aalto Museum
Who was Aino Alto?
Born in 1894 to a progressive working-class family, Aino Marsio Aalto was an architect, designer and one of Artek’s founding figures. She was one of a handful of women to attend the University of Technology in Helsinki in the 1910s, where she took courses in interior and product design, alongside traineeships in landscape architecture, bricklaying, carpentry and joinery, before graduating as an architect. It was at the University of Technology where she met Alvar Aalto, who she joined at his design office in 1924 as a draughtsperson. They married the following year and two children followed.
Aino and Alvar enjoyed a close creative collaboration, with numerous works signed by both. Others, however, were signed only by the practice’s head – Alvar – obscuring Aino’s role in many projects.
In 1935, together with Alvar and the art collectors Maire Gullichsen and Nils-Gustav Hahl, Aino co-founded Artek to “sell furniture and promote a modern culture of living.” As artistic director, Aino helped shape its manifesto, and her creative vision was key to the development of a distinct “Artek style”. While the Artek tradition was often associated with pure lines and reduced aesthetics, Aino’s application of soft and natural materials brought warmth and livability to Artek’s projects.
Through this combination of simplicity and humanity, Aino’s work set a path for contemporary Finnish interior design and Finnish design as a whole.
Alvar Aalto Museum © Alvar Aalto Museum
Alvar Aalto Museum © Alvar Aalto Museum
Eino Mäkinen © Alvar Aalto Museum
“The beauty of the everyday”
Artek's concept of "the beauty of the everyday", or “kaunis arki” in Finnish, is the belief that beauty should not be reserved for extraordinary moments, but instead, the aesthetics of ordinary objects should be celebrated. It embraces the inherent charm of everyday life, encouraging appreciation for the subtle details and design found in our daily surroundings.
Through her creative direction of Artek, Aino Aalto played a crucial role in establishing this ethos. Her designs were characterised by simplicity, functionality and a deep respect for natural materials. She was particularly interested in creating designs that enhanced everyday life, focusing on practicality without sacrificing beauty through clean lines, organic forms and coalescence with nature. It was her exceptional ability to achieve a synthesis of form and function that gave her designs, whether essential daily products or large public spaces, the elemental quality of “kaunis arki”.
Aino was strongly inspired by the pioneering spirit of textile manufacturing of the time. She drew inspiration from the materials she found while travelling, sketching ideas in her journal of things that excited her. She often ordered textiles from foreign retailers to apply to her projects, but also quickly built a network of Finnish fabric manufacturers to produce textiles of varying materials and techniques, working closely with them to achieve her vision.
Through this fascination with textiles, Aino designed numerous patterns for Artek – ranging from rational motives with stripe patterns and dotted details to more decorative ones inspired by floral and other natural motifs – and conceptualised their usage. It was textiles, along with other natural materials, that brought layers of warmth and softness to Artek’s interiors, such as Restaurant Savoy and Villa Mairea.
In addition, Aino played a role in establishing Artek furniture for children. Creating scaled versions of the wider Artek collection, the only distinction between the adult and children’s pieces was the size. In doing so, Aino extended the “beauty of the everyday” to all: Artek furnished many schools in Finland during Aino's lifetime and continues to do so, bringing form and function to the everyday lives of children.
Drawing on this diverse range of experiences, Aino developed a holistic approach to design, working across multiple scales and specialities. Throughout her career, she designed glassware, ceramics, lighting and furniture.
Artek © Alvar Aalto Museum
Kuvapaja © Alvar Aalto Museum
The Kirsukankukka pattern
In the 1930s, Aino Aalto met the Japanese ambassador to Finland, Hikotaro Ichikawa and his wife, Kayoko, who gave Aino a gift of silk fabric with a cherry blossom motif. Inspired by the design, Aino created the Kirsikankukka pattern – meaning cherry blossom in Finnish – as an homage to Japanese art and design. The pattern, among many others created by Aino, was part of the standard collection of printed fabrics sold at Artek, used in interior design projects or for upholstering, but was sadly lost over time.
Then, in 2016, a small replica print was rediscovered at an exhibition dedicated to Aino in Tokyo, and small original swatches of the fabric were located at the Alvar Aalto Museum in Jyväskylä, Finland. These swatches were too small to show the full repeat of the pattern but with research led by the Aalto archive and the Aalto family, who happened to have Aino’s original drawings for the cherry blossom motif, the pattern was reconstituted and brought back into production in 2018.
Now, with Tekla and Artek’s collaboration, this pattern is made available to home textiles once more, as it is introduced to bedding for the first time.
Alvar Aalto, The Aalto House © Alvar Aalto Foundation, alvaraalto.fi