How Finland Makes Simplicity The Ultimate Luxury / By Barry Stone / Publisher Luxurytravelmag

Amid southern Finland’s forests, lakes and islands, a quieter kind of luxury unfolds – one where design and sustainability live in harmony with the natural worldIn 1963 on the western shoreline of secluded Lake Kaitlampi in southern Finland, 45 minutes northwest of Helsinki, Eino Ala-Outinen did what a lot of Finns do: he built himself a simple log cabin.

It had one main room with a kitchen, dining and bedroom all together, a brick fireplace and of course a sauna – all just metres from the lake, which freezes over in winter.

Today, eight wooden summer cottages make up Hawkhill Cottage Resort, whose core message is to reflect and celebrate what it is to be Finnish, to protect and have a deep respect for nature, and to never take any of it for granted.

Ala-Outinen’s grandchildren and their family still use that first summer cottage to this day.

Surrounding Hawkhill’s tiny enclave is the pine, spruce and birch-filled expanse of Nuuksio National Park, filled with untouched forests, lakes, streams and impressive granite outcrops of geologic bedrock – glacial remnants from the last Ice Age.

The snow here is knee-high in winter. There are deer, elk, lynx and bears, an endless array of thick mosses and lichens, and in the summer an abundance of lingonberries and blueberries grow.

There are also large tracts of Finland’s ancient, mystical peatlands – its precious bogs. Up to a third of Finland was once classed as peatland: sunken wetlands rich in biodiversity and very effective carbon sinks.

After WWII logging here went into overdrive and bogs were drained for tree planting. But bogs were never designed to grow trees, and much-needed reclamations are now common, a process that mostly involves the removal of introduced floral species so that the ground can be returned to its natural state.

Hawkhill has been working to reclaim their very own bog in collaboration with Metsähallitus, a state-owned entity responsible for managing Finland’s national parks.

A meeting with nature

Southern Finland is blessed with raw and ravishing swathes of nature, and has in abundance what much of Europe – and the rest of us – are seeking: silence, space and clean air to breathe.

Visit and you might learn how to turn pine cones into ‘cone animals’ by adding twigs to make arms and legs, or discover how to tap a birch tree by eeking out a four-centimetre-deep hole in the bark and watch as the water – which the tree draws up from the ground through its roots and is purer than any bottled water you’ll find – fills your container.

You might get lost in Finland’s endless tracts of forest if you ever wander off a trail, but you’ll never die of thirst – millions of water-laden birch will see to that.

Locals are eager to chat with me wherever I go. I meet a fisherman who can’t stop talking about cod, and a farmer who spends an hour telling me how she’s trying to buy adjacent land from the church because she wants more space so she can buy more Icelandic horses.

The forests, however, are only half the story.

If you get this far south, you need to keep going because where the land ends, a seemingly endless collection of archipelagos totalling more than 180,000 islands and islets stretching along the Gulf of Finland, begins.

Into the wild

One of these is the Barösund Archipelago, a watery realm of heavily forested islands filled with the usual pine, spruce and birch, and occasional stands of oak.

Large, 300-year-old iron rings can still be seen embedded in its granite coastline, once used to guide large ships through its narrow passages in windy conditions during the Age of Sail.

Older still Viking-era myths and legends abound. The Vikings never conquered Finland, but the straits around Barösund were a crucial trade route to riches in the east.