The Evolving Elegance of Restaurant Savoy
Ilse Crawford reflects on restoring Restaurant Savoy in line with Aino Aalto’s original vision—where natural materials and quiet elegance create a warm and inviting ambience.
Restaurant Savoy has been a Helsinki landmark destination for cuisine and culture ever since it opened its doors in 1937. From the outset, its ambitions were straightforward but deceptively hard to achieve. “What do I mean by the word restaurant?” asked GW Rasmussen, the site’s first restaurateur. “A refuge for people who want to enjoy good food and drinks in a beautiful and comfortable environment.”
That the Savoy has managed to achieve this for the best part of a century is in no small part due to the contributions of three of the four Artek founders. The Savoy includes the restaurant space and function rooms, occupying the top two floors of an imposing building on Helsinki’s Esplanade, that leads to the main harbour in central Helsinki. Known as the “Industrial Palace”, the building was constructed to house the Ahlström corporation.
The enduring Aalto vision
It was Maire Gullichsen, a scion of the Ahlström family and a founder of Artek, who dreamed of a restaurant that would serve excellent food in a setting that highlighted contemporary Finnish design. Jung & Jung, the architects of the building, expressed their keenness to also design the restaurant but Maire and her husband Harry Gullichsen had only one duo in mind—Aino and Alvar Aalto.
Aino and Alvar Aalto believed that spaces, both public and private, should reflect the personalities of those who used it, and Restaurant Savoy is no exception. The restaurant was designed to attract businesspeople, artists and Helsinki’s urban elite. The ambience was to be one of energy. An air of warm conviviality flows through the top-floor space, with echoes of long lunches and conversations that continue into the evening as guests look out across the city skyline towards Helsinki’s cathedral. The space is brought to life by the Aaltos’ customary attention to small details, which accumulate to create a harmonious whole.
“There is the idea that a musician breathes spirit into their instrument… I feel that Savoy is an embodiment of (the Aaltos’) values,” says Ilse Crawford, the British interior designer whose design studio, StudioIlse, oversaw a recent refurbishment of Restaurant Savoy. Over the years, alterations and new features had accumulated in a way that compromised the aesthetic the Aaltos had intended. “We looked at the things that needed to be integrated to make it work better for today, always with the Aaltos’ voices in our minds. We thought about the subtlety of the details that they brought, and the warmth of wood, and approached the restoration of the Savoy from that direction.”
Timeless design through natural materials
Aino Aalto’s commitment to creating rich and multi-layered interiors is evidenced in the abundance of natural materials that fill Restaurant Savoy. The exterior walls are clad in mahogany, while the interior walls that connect to the entrance hall are made of Oregon pine. The tables are softly lit with Golden Bell pendant lights, which were designed especially for the restaurant. The Golden Bell’s elegance and streamlined aesthetic has seen it go on to become one of Artek’s most enduring products, equally suited to home environments as the commercial space for which they were first designed. Various other lighting fixtures had been added over the years, and Studio Ilse sought to replace with more appropriate alternatives during their restoration, such as the Artek A201 Pendant and Golden Bell wall light, which had previously gone out of production.
The elmwood club armchair, designed by Aino Aalto for the dining tables, left an impression on Crawford and her team, who worked closely with Artek in refurbishing much of the furniture. “We noticed that the club chair had very specific dimensions to the table — the height and dimensions, the give in the seat, they were all perfectly aligned with the table. We adapted the Chair 611 for the outside space in accordance with this.”
A limewashed brick wall behind the banquette provides a pop of contrasting white to accentuate the wood-dominated spaces. The banquette itself is now bedecked in an eye-catching black and white striped material that was added during the refurbishment. “Aino was a big fan of black and white. If you look at the Aalto house, and any projects which (the Aaltos) did. We brought back the black and white in the form of stripes, inspired by one of her dresses.”
Merging function with intimacy
In addition to the lively atmosphere of the 8th floor restaurant, the Savoy also incorporates 7th floor of the Industrial Palace building, with a series of private rooms designed to hold business meetings and private gatherings.
While the atmosphere is more introverted than upstairs, the attention to detail is equally considered. As with the restaurant upstairs, a corporate atmosphere had crept in over time, which StudioIlse sought to address while working closely with Artek and Artek 2nd Cycle.
As Crawford states “What could be nicer than gathering in warm, domesticated rooms designed by the Aaltos? It’s really quite a relief to have meetings and celebrations in lovely spaces that give you that feeling of being in a private apartment. These kinds of humane environments are healthier, more sustainable and make for better workplaces.”
While Restaurant Savoy has changed with the times, the original vision of Maire Gullichsen and the Aaltos has been retained through constant evolution, retaining the enduring harmony of natural materials, comfort and culinary excellence. It continues to offer not just a meal but a memorable experience — one where heritage, hospitality and comfort converge.
