PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKAEL NIEMI
Born from a deep frustration with the sterile perfection dominating common interior magazines, this feature continues our mission to show places as they truly are. Tila challenges the selection of spaces shown, the allowed aesthetics, and rejects curated emptiness. It looks instead for rooms thick with history and particular to the people behind them, the kind of spaces whose layers of personal and cultural memory are worth preserving rather than stripped away.
I ended up at Kosmos because my mom had booked a table for me and my godmother as part of a yearly ritual of eating out together. Just before, that same autumn I had finally worked out who the designer Stefan Lindfors was (I know, a bit late), at the launch party for the second issue of Sälä at Post Bar in Helsinki, where he happened to have an event of his own and our makings ended up side by side in the same rooms. I live in Jätkäsaari, and around then I also learned he was behind a wild hotel interior and exterior a few streets from mine. So when I walked into Kosmos and realised the glowing red entrance was his, my first thought was, why does this designer keep getting so close to me?
I fell for the place on the spot. The interior is stunning and a little edgy, the food is forthright, and when you sit in the hall you feel an odd contrast between yourself and the room, as if you have been carried back in time but forgot to dress for it. I am a sucker for that kind of mismatch, and at Kosmos it starts at the door: a very attentive doorman greets you in the very Kubrickian entrance while the ornamental dining hall is already glittering just past their shoulder.
That hall has barely changed since 1934. Arvo O. Aalto gave it its look, Einari Kyöstilä designed the furniture, and the sculptor Eino Räsänen carved the Hellenic reliefs that still cap the ends of the booths. The restaurant itself goes back to 1924, when Yrjö Teodor Lindfors opened a plain, affordable dining room during prohibition. The family later Finnicized their name to Hepolampi and has run the place without a break ever since, four generations of women at the head. The line runs from Aino, who ran it from 1934 until her death in 1993, to Kiira, who leads it today, with her cousin Veera the latest of the family to come aboard. When asked why so much of the old room survived, they describe it in two phases: first out of necessity, later a matter of conviction. At first, back in the days there was no money to renovate, and by the time there would have been, they had understood that the old was worth keeping. They are just as quick to add that the restaurant is not a museum but a working room that lives in its own time. The art on the walls was bought across the decades from the shows of the artists who ate here.
The entrance is proof that keeping the old does not mean fearing the new. When the family wanted some life up front they asked Stefan Lindfors, a regular at Kosmos in the nineties, who had become a friend. The story says that he said no, until Katri Hepolampi told him she would simply ask someone else, and then he changed his mind. His entrance split opinion when it arrived but is now almost as much Kosmos as the dining hall itself. When it was updated, the old WC tiles needed updating but were set on display by the door, which might be the most Kosmos gesture of all. The original idea has held, too. Kosmos drew journalists and painters in the fifties, writers and left-wing radicals in the sixties, business types in the eighties, and it still seats all of them side by side. The crowd is said to be a little better behaved these days, the lunches less wet and less smoky than they once were, but the atmosphere is still welcoming and the guests diverse.
I experienced Espoon Mattopesu by accident. A friend of mine grew up in Espoo and is loyal to its businesses, I guess, since one Thursday (the only window we had to see each other on a busy week) we drove a rug from Jätkäsaari out to her laundry in Finnoo. I did not expect to spend the visit posting photos to Instagram. Espoon Mattopesu has a charming, distinctive, older interior in one open space, where you can see all the rugs waiting to be washed or collected, and the choices in the space struck me as almost bold. It is layered, inventive and made on a human scale with a twinkle in one's eye, and I decided on the spot that the next time I got to write Tila, I would praise it.
Olli Palander has been building the place by hand since 1995. When he took the space it was surrounded by fields and full of a telemarketer's phone booths, and he has shaped it slowly into what it is now. He does most of the work himself, tints the wood by hand, and likes setting something sharp against something soft. If it looks good it looks good, and if it doesn't it doesn't, he says, though few can ever say quite why. The ceiling is the clearest case. Tired of hanging lights every December, he built a wood-panelled ceiling with light slipping through the gaps between the boards, the colour changeable by season, the glow bounced back by metallic sauna tape. Equipment suppliers who have seen every laundry in the country tell him they have never come across one like it.
Behind the till hangs the piece he is fondest of, a landscape pieced together from differently toned scraps of wood, showing the rug-washing pier at Kaivopuisto, where Helsinki has hauled its carpets down to scrub them clean in the sea for generations. His father gave it to him on opening day and it has not moved since. Even the logo is his own, a rolled carpet worked into a small crown he calls the “pesukruunu”.
Olli Palander has been building the place by hand since 1995. When he took the space it was surrounded by fields and full of a telemarketer's phone booths, and he has shaped it slowly into what it is now. He does most of the work himself, tints the wood by hand, and likes setting something sharp against something soft. If it looks good it looks good, and if it doesn't it doesn't, he says, though few can ever say quite why. The ceiling is the clearest case. Tired of hanging lights every December, he built a wood-panelled ceiling with light slipping through the gaps between the boards, the colour changeable by season, the glow bounced back by metallic sauna tape. Equipment suppliers who have seen every laundry in the country tell him they have never come across one like it.
Behind the till hangs the piece he is fondest of, a landscape pieced together from differently toned scraps of wood, showing the rug-washing pier at Kaivopuisto, where Helsinki has hauled its carpets down to scrub them clean in the sea for generations. His father gave it to him on opening day and it has not moved since. Even the logo is his own, a rolled carpet worked into a small crown he calls the “pesukruunu”.
There is enormous pressure to keep up with interiors and trends, and it shows in everything from how you dress a restaurant to how you draw a logo, treated as the ticket to success or the fast way off the competition table. Following trends tends to lead to repetition and safe decisions, with colour handled like a menace to neutralise. And a refresh is its own gamble, since it dates quickly and feeds a wasteful cycle of renovation. If it isn't broken, don't fix it, one might say. The catch is that a space built without any deeper planning or soul reads as broken from the start, and that is the look people keep paying to chase away. What Kosmos and Espoon Mattopesu have instead is the one thing a refresh can never install: depth that gathered slowly, over years, in the care of people who stayed and learned to see the worth in what was already there. You cannot order that from a catalogue, and there is less and less of it around. The two of them honour their own history and their own taste instead of anyone else's trend, and it is probably no accident that both are family businesses. Maybe that is the connection I felt. When the place is family, you can afford to let it be soulful and particular, and to let the years you have spent together show in the room.
Both the staff of Kosmos and Espoon Mattopesu were interviewed for this piece. A thousand thanks to both, for their time and for the chance to try to capture a few small fragments of these places' souls.
Both the staff of Kosmos and Espoon Mattopesu were interviewed for this piece. A thousand thanks to both, for their time and for the chance to try to capture a few small fragments of these places' souls.
05 / 11 / 2026
I visited Kosmos and Espoon Mattopesu around the same time in my life, and I have thought about them as a pair ever since.
I ended up at Kosmos because my mom had booked a table for me and my godmother as part of a yearly ritual of eating out together. Just before, that same autumn I had finally worked out who the designer Stefan Lindfors was (I know, a bit late), at the launch party for the second issue of Sälä at Post Bar in Helsinki, where he happened to have an event of his own and our makings ended up side by side in the same rooms. I live in Jätkäsaari, and around then I also learned he was behind a wild hotel interior and exterior a few streets from mine. So when I walked into Kosmos and realised the glowing red entrance was his, my first thought was, why does this designer keep getting so close to me?
I fell for the place on the spot. The interior is stunning and a little edgy, the food is forthright, and when you sit in the hall you feel an odd contrast between yourself and the room, as if you have been carried back in time but forgot to dress for it. I am a sucker for that kind of mismatch, and at Kosmos it starts at the door: a very attentive doorman greets you in the very Kubrickian entrance while the ornamental dining hall is already glittering just past their shoulder.
That hall has barely changed since 1934. Arvo O. Aalto gave it its look, Einari Kyöstilä designed the furniture, and the sculptor Eino Räsänen carved the Hellenic reliefs that still cap the ends of the booths. The restaurant itself goes back to 1924, when Yrjö Teodor Lindfors opened a plain, affordable dining room during prohibition. The family later Finnicized their name to Hepolampi and has run the place without a break ever since, four generations of women at the head. The line runs from Aino, who ran it from 1934 until her death in 1993, to Kiira, who leads it today, with her cousin Veera the latest of the family to come aboard. When asked why so much of the old room survived, they describe it in two phases: first out of necessity, later a matter of conviction. At first, back in the days there was no money to renovate, and by the time there would have been, they had understood that the old was worth keeping. They are just as quick to add that the restaurant is not a museum but a working room that lives in its own time. The art on the walls was bought across the decades from the shows of the artists who ate here.
The entrance is proof that keeping the old does not mean fearing the new. When the family wanted some life up front they asked Stefan Lindfors, a regular at Kosmos in the nineties, who had become a friend. The story says that he said no, until Katri Hepolampi told him she would simply ask someone else, and then he changed his mind. His entrance split opinion when it arrived but is now almost as much Kosmos as the dining hall itself. When it was updated, the old WC tiles needed updating but were set on display by the door, which might be the most Kosmos gesture of all. The original idea has held, too. Kosmos drew journalists and painters in the fifties, writers and left-wing radicals in the sixties, business types in the eighties, and it still seats all of them side by side. The crowd is said to be a little better behaved these days, the lunches less wet and less smoky than they once were, but the atmosphere is still welcoming and the guests diverse.
I experienced Espoon Mattopesu by accident. A friend of mine grew up in Espoo and is loyal to its businesses, I guess, since one Thursday (the only window we had to see each other on a busy week) we drove a rug from Jätkäsaari out to her laundry in Finnoo. I did not expect to spend the visit posting photos to Instagram. Espoon Mattopesu has a charming, distinctive, older interior in one open space, where you can see all the rugs waiting to be washed or collected, and the choices in the space struck me as almost bold. It is layered, inventive and made on a human scale with a twinkle in one's eye, and I decided on the spot that the next time I got to write Tila, I would praise it.
Olli Palander has been building the place by hand since 1995. When he took the space it was surrounded by fields and full of a telemarketer's phone booths, and he has shaped it slowly into what it is now. He does most of the work himself, tints the wood by hand, and likes setting something sharp against something soft. If it looks good it looks good, and if it doesn't it doesn't, he says, though few can ever say quite why. The ceiling is the clearest case. Tired of hanging lights every December, he built a wood-panelled ceiling with light slipping through the gaps between the boards, the colour changeable by season, the glow bounced back by metallic sauna tape. Equipment suppliers who have seen every laundry in the country tell him they have never come across one like it.
Behind the till hangs the piece he is fondest of, a landscape pieced together from differently toned scraps of wood, showing the rug-washing pier at Kaivopuisto, where Helsinki has hauled its carpets down to scrub them clean in the sea for generations. His father gave it to him on opening day and it has not moved since. Even the logo is his own, a rolled carpet worked into a small crown he calls the “pesukruunu”.
There is enormous pressure to keep up with interiors and trends, and it shows in everything from how you dress a restaurant to how you draw a logo, treated as the ticket to success or the fast way off the competition table. Following trends tends to lead to repetition and safe decisions, with colour handled like a menace to neutralise. And a refresh is its own gamble, since it dates quickly and feeds a wasteful cycle of renovation. If it isn't broken, don't fix it, one might say. The catch is that a space built without any deeper planning or soul reads as broken from the start, and that is the look people keep paying to chase away. What Kosmos and Espoon Mattopesu have instead is the one thing a refresh can never install: depth that gathered slowly, over years, in the care of people who stayed and learned to see the worth in what was already there. You cannot order that from a catalogue, and there is less and less of it around. The two of them honour their own history and their own taste instead of anyone else's trend, and it is probably no accident that both are family businesses. Maybe that is the connection I felt. When the place is family, you can afford to let it be soulful and particular, and to let the years you have spent together show in the room.
Both the staff of Kosmos and Espoon Mattopesu were interviewed for this piece. A thousand thanks to both, for their time and for the chance to try to capture a few small fragments of these places' souls.