Discover luxury ski hotels and lodges in Finland

Finland’s capital Helsinki is a sharply dressed shrine to objets – Aartek’s bent-wood chairs, Iittala’s glassware, Arabia’s tea sets – with notable past-and-present landmarks: the Byzantine Revival Uspenski Cathedral, for example, and Alvar Aalto’s modernist Finlandia Hall. The eminently walkable city is set for first-class Scandinavian bar crawls: from cocktail den to craft brewery to sauna. And, Helsinki’s a crucible of new Nordic dining, where chefs use what can be teased from the ground and foraged in a land where little grows willingly. Fare gets more rugged the further north you go – past vast national parks of pine forests and placid bodies of water that earned the country its nickname ‘Land of the 1,000 Lakes’ (the actual number is 187,888). Elk and reindeer roam chilly plains, the Northern Lights flare up and a certain Mr Claus has his mail forwarded to the town of Rovaniemi – his official address.