Iittala Glass: Finnish Material Culture from Factory Town to Global Design Icon

Many people first meet Iittala glass at the table rather than in a museum: a plain tumbler, a wavy-edged vase, a bowl ringed with tiny drops of glass. Behind those everyday objects is a working factory in a small village in southern Finland, where glass has been made since 1881, and a long partnership between the factory and a succession of Finnish architects and designers. Day 19 of our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour of Denmark, Sweden and Finland is spent there. This article follows the story from the factory village to the international design company, and explains what Iittala glass tells us about how Finland learned to furnish its homes.

A glassworks in a Häme village

Iittala is a village in the Häme region of southern Finland, within the Hämeenlinna area. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum records that the glassworks was founded there in 1881 by the Swedish glassblower Petrus (also recorded as Peter) Magnus Abrahamsson, and that the new works first hired Swedish workers. That was a common pattern in the Nordic glass trade of the time: skilled blowers moved between factories, and the technical knowledge of the furnace travelled with them.

For its first decades Iittala was an ordinary industrial glassworks, making glass for practical use. The change in ownership that shaped its future came during the First World War. According to Cooper Hewitt, the A. Ahlström company acquired the Karhula glassworks in 1915 and the Iittala works in 1917, after which the combined business became known as Karhula-Iittala. Ahlström was a large industrial group, and that backing gave the glassworks the resources to do something new in the 1930s: invite architects and artists to design for it.

The glassworks is still the reason most visitors come. The City of Hämeenlinna’s tourism pages describe Iittala as a centre for Finnish design, handicrafts and arts, and the factory as still in operation, with a free visitors’ platform from which the glassblowers can be watched at work. That continuity, more than any single object, is what makes a visit useful: the place where the designs are made is also the place where their history is told.

Competitions, architects and the Aalto vase

In the 1930s Karhula-Iittala began holding design competitions, and two entries still in production came from a married pair of architects. Iittala records that Aino Aalto’s pressed glass entry, Bölgeblick, took second place in a competition held by the Karhula glassworks in 1932. Its stacked rings, which Iittala likens to the circles that spread when a stone is thrown into water, made a functional, stackable glass for ordinary use, and the range is still produced under the Aino Aalto name.

Four years later came the design most closely tied to the factory. The Alvar Aalto Foundation records that Alvar Aalto submitted his sketches to a design competition held by the Karhula-Iittala glassworks in 1936, and that the resulting glassware was made to be shown in the Finnish section of the Paris World Exhibition in 1937. The vase takes its alternative name, the Savoy vase, from the Helsinki restaurant of the same name. Its free-flowing outline was a sharp break from the cut and decorated glass of the period, and Fiskars Group, which owns Iittala, describes it as differing from the art glassware of its time.

Where the vase was made is part of its story. According to the Alvar Aalto Foundation, it was produced at the Karhula-Iittala glassworks from 1937 to 1949 and at the Iittala glassworks from 1949 onwards. Iittala states that each vase in its Alvar Aalto Collection is still mouth-blown at the Iittala factory. To understand the architect behind it, our guide to the Alvar Aalto House and Studio in Helsinki, which the tour visits on day 17, looks at how Aalto lived and worked.

Designers in the factory: Wirkkala and Sarpaneva

After the Second World War, Iittala’s link with designers became a lasting working arrangement rather than a series of one-off competitions. Cooper Hewitt records that Tapio Wirkkala won the company’s glass design competition in 1946 and became its chief designer, and that his work helped bring the firm, and modern Scandinavian design more broadly, international attention in the post-war years. Iittala credits Wirkkala with introducing the stick-blowing method in 1953, in which a bubble is formed using a wet wooden stick, and states that his Tapio glasses were designed for the 1954 Milan Triennale. In 1968 he created Ultima Thule, whose textured surface, inspired by melting ice in Lapland, Iittala says demands a carefully perfected blowing technique.

Timo Sarpaneva joined at almost the same time. Cooper Hewitt records that he began working for the Iittala glassworks in 1950, that his i-line range of plates, bottles and other objects contributed to a Grand Prix at the 1957 Milan Triennale, and that he created the company’s logo, a white lower-case letter i in a red circle. That small mark gave the name of a village a visual identity of its own.

What these designers shared was a way of working: they designed for production, in close contact with the people at the furnace. Iittala’s own accounts stress this exchange, crediting Wirkkala with a new blowing method and Oiva Toikka’s glass birds to his hands-on approach with the glassblowing team. The result was a body of glass in which art glass and everyday tableware came from the same hands and the same furnaces, and in which a design could stay in production for decades.

Kaj Franck, Kartio and a family of glassworks

Some of the glass sold under the Iittala name today has roots in other Finnish factories. Iittala dates Kaj Franck’s Kartio glass to 1958 and describes it as a basic drinking glass in which form is pared down to the essentials. At that time Franck was not working for Iittala: the Architecture & Design Museum in Helsinki (formerly Design Museum Helsinki) records that he became artistic director of the Arabia ceramics factory in 1948 and of the Nuutajärvi glassworks in 1951, and that from the mid-1950s glass became his main material.

Nuutajärvi and Iittala came together decades later. British Glass, the UK glass industry body, reported that the Iittala and Nuutajärvi glassworks merged at the beginning of 1988 to form Iittala-Nuutajärvi Oy. Designs from Nuutajärvi’s history then joined the Iittala range. Toikka’s glass birds are another example: Iittala says the collection began in 1972 at the Nuutajärvi glass factory with a small glass flycatcher, and that each bird is handcrafted and mouth-blown at the Iittala Glass Factory today. Toikka’s Kastehelmi pressed glass, with its rings of small glass droplets, was designed in 1964 and relaunched in 2010, according to Iittala.

Franck’s own approach explains why Kartio fits so comfortably into this family. Iittala notes that Franck is known as the “conscience of Finnish design” and that he used serial production to make versatile, practical tableware at a reasonable price. A glass that is simple, durable and made in many colours is material culture in the plainest sense: an object designed to be used every day, in ordinary homes, for decades.

From factory brand to international design company

Iittala’s ownership changed several times in the second half of the twentieth century, and each change widened what the name stood for. After the 1988 merger with Nuutajärvi, the glassworks became part of larger homeware groups that also took in other Nordic makers. When Fiskars Corporation announced its agreement to buy the Iittala Group from the private equity company ABN AMRO Capital on 29 June 2007, its stock exchange release listed brands including Iittala, Arabia, Hackman and Rörstrand among those joining it. Iittala has been part of Fiskars Group since that acquisition.

That history explains why a modern Iittala range spans glass, ceramics and other materials, and why some designs carry names that began at other factories. Fiskars Group dates Iittala’s glass factory to 1881 and describes the brand as known for collaborating with designers and artists. In 2024 Iittala introduced a new logo and a yellow brand colour, which the design magazine designboom reported was meant to suggest molten glass. The factory in the village remains the link between that international brand and the craft it was built on.

How Iittala glass differs from Swedish art glass

It helps to compare Iittala with the Swedish glass seen earlier on the tour. In Småland, our article on Kosta Boda glass and Sweden’s glassworks tradition follows a forest glassworks whose modern identity grew around artists and sculptural art glass. Iittala’s story has a different emphasis. Its signature designs were made in series, for everyday use, and many have stayed in production for decades.

The difference is one of system rather than skill. Both traditions depend on teams of glassblowers, and Iittala’s designers also made art glass. But the Finnish factory tied its identity to a set of long-running designs by named architects and designers, and to the idea that good design should be available for daily use. Seeing both on one journey shows two answers to the same question: what a glassworks is for.

Day 19: the Iittala Design Museum and Glass Factory

The tour reaches Finland on day 17, after an overnight ferry from Stockholm, and spends its first two days in Helsinki on architecture, the Alvar Aalto House and Studio, the Artek showroom, the Marimekko flagship store and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. On day 19 the group travels to Iittala, about an hour and a half from Helsinki, for a guided tour of the Iittala Design Museum and Glass Factory, followed by some free time at the Iittala outlet store. The group returns to Helsinki in the early afternoon, and the rest of the day is at leisure.

Visit Alvar Aalto, the website of the cultural route on Aalto’s architecture and design heritage, describes the museum as set in the cultural-historical area of the glass factory. It says the main exhibition presents Iittala’s glass history, with art glass and serial design products from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, and focuses on the Aalto vase and the golden age of Finnish design in the 1950s. In the factory, the same source says, the work of the glassblowers can be followed from a viewing balcony or with a guide.

How long is the drive from Helsinki to Iittala?

Iittala is about an hour and a half from Helsinki, according to the tour itinerary. The group returns to Helsinki in the early afternoon, so the rest of the day is free and there is no change of hotel.

Will we see glass being blown at the Iittala factory?

The itinerary includes a guided tour of the Iittala Design Museum and Glass Factory, and Visit Alvar Aalto states that visitors can follow the glassblowers’ work from a viewing balcony. What is being made on a given day depends on the factory’s own production schedule. For what is planned on your departure, ask a Tour Specialist.

Is entry to the Iittala Design Museum included?

Yes. The tour includes all excursions, entrance fees and local guides, so the guided museum and factory tour on day 19 carries no extra ticket. If you plan a return visit on your own, check the official Iittala and Hämeenlinna tourism websites for opening hours.

How much walking does the Iittala day involve?

The tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate): participants should be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. The itinerary does not give a separate walking figure for the Iittala visit. For questions about your own pace on this day, speak to a Tour Specialist.

Iittala in the wider Scandinavian design story

Iittala closes a route that has followed design through furniture, textiles, architecture and glass. Our learning-led overview of Scandinavian design across Denmark, Sweden and Finland sets each stop in context. In Helsinki, the day before Iittala, the group visits the Marimekko flagship store, the subject of our article on Marimekko’s prints and Finnish everyday culture, which shares Iittala’s interest in bold, practical design for ordinary homes.

For the city behind these companies, our guide to Helsinki’s history and character gives the wider picture, and our answers to common questions about travelling in Finland cover the country-level practicalities. Together they show how Finnish design grew out of a small country’s need to make useful things well.

Iittala began as a rural glassworks staffed by Swedish blowers and became an international design brand without leaving its village. Standing in the factory, with the designs of Aalto, Wirkkala, Sarpaneva and Franck in the museum next door, a small group of up to 16 travellers can see how a material, a place and a group of designers came together to shape the look of modern Finnish life.