Big helpings of hygge in Scandinavia’s archipelagos

Our stocky little boat weaves through salt-edged gneiss in a flat sea where mute swans glide at the head of single wakes. “The best days are when the sky is grey, the rock is grey, the sea is grey,” says Aleksi Hautamäki, as he steers us towards his archipelago home.

He’s out of luck. The sky is blue and the sea glassy clear. Islands float like toys, whether small skerries or pine-covered peaks.

We (my wife, small son and I) are at the end of a two-week journey from Stockholm to Helsinki, through the archipelagos that guard the Gulf of Bothnia from the Baltic Sea. We are travelling by ferry, road and private boat, staying in four cabins, our self-catering being supplemented by occasional visits from waterborne chefs.

The Scandinavian cabin used to be a simple affair, Moomins creator Tove Jansson famously describing her own as “a room with four windows, one in each wall”. But in recent years they’ve become a source of architectural aspiration, and countless coffee table books.

Aleksi’s Project Ö, on his island of Skjulskäret in the Gulf of Finland, is the acme of this old art made new. It appears in front of us: pine and glass on top of boulders, steps rising through granite. On our penultimate evening we eat on Aleksi’s dock as a pair of white-tailed eagles swing in to raid the nests of terns and eider on the neighbouring isle. We munch asparagus as the terns do battle with these beasts, the sky full of shrieking.

We begin, though, in Sweden, flying to Stockholm and driving an hour south to Trosa, a fishing village that is a getaway for Swedish royals such as Prince Carl Philip and Björn and Benny from Abba. “Friends from New York said it’s like Sweden’s Sag Harbor,” says Umberto Garabello, who is hosting us at Landet, a few miles southwest of the village. It’s one of those hygge words. “It means countryside, but carries the connotation of slowing down, spending time with people you love, cooking by the fireplace,” he says.

Umberto is Italian, the son of a Fiat engineer. He came to Stockholm to work for a start-up and went native. Now he drives a Volvo, at the speed limit. Falling in love with the countryside, he rented land on the coast and created a modern cabin design, which can be delivered by truck.

Over the past four months he has placed five of them among the pine trees, with another four to come. Inside are deep-pile rugs and the softest fabrics on a bed that looks out to a meadow where hares and deer frolic. The bathroom is big. “The idea is a shower that is comfortable for two people,” he says. In our case it’s three, which is less sexy.

The revelation — of the whole trip — is the food. Umberto’s building an honesty store full of local produce. We feed our two-year-old son milk, yoghurt and eggs from a nearby farm. I offer a slice of Gotlansbröd smothered in anklevermousse med grönpeppar (paté), which, after a suspicious sniff, he devours. “He’s going to be a good man,” says my wife Camila, with a happy mother’s deranged logic.

In the morning we walk the 100 yards to the shore, then catch a boat to Trosa and Fina Fisken, a superb restaurant. We eat Toast Skagen in the sun, Swedish prawns on grilled bread. That evening the restaurant delivers boxes to our cabin, pre-prepared cod neck served with new potatoes and asparagus with trout roe. I put it together, garnishing with the provided dill. It’s among the best meals I’ve ever served.

We eschew the yoga, berry picking and kayaking on offer for a short drive to the artist James Turrell’s northernmost Skyspace, where the sunset is manipulated to create astonishing colours. Turrell’s work will keep coming back to me as we travel through the kaleidoscope of the archipelagos’ shifting light.

Returning our rental car in Stockholm, we put up at the Grand, the aptly named hotel where Nobel prize winners stay. The Swedish capital is one of the great archipelago cities, and our windows offer a view across the waters of the Norrström to the Royal Palace.

At 7am the following morning we board the Viking Grace, a huge ferry, for the passage to the autonomous Finnish region of Åland. All tickets come with a cabin and ours has a picture window through which to watch leafy islands full of houses be replaced by others more sparse and wild.

The journey’s five hours pass swiftly and from Mariehamn, Åland’s capital, we take a taxi 30 minutes north. At a rough pier we’re met by the manager of the Silverskär islands and transferred by fishing boat to our own: the 28-hectare Sviskär.

We follow a trail through spruce, birch and lichens that speak of a pristine world, until a fisherman’s cabin known as the “hermit hut” appears above a bay. There’s a small kitchen, doors with wooden bolts, and four bunks, one of which pulls out to create a double. A little way off is a long drop loo, and beyond a wood-fired sauna.

The cabin is make-believe, built in 2003 to appear authentically old. But it’s done oh-so-well. Even the loo is lovely, with a jug and basin and old magazines, and a view of a bay where long-tailed ducks squabble.

I pull logs from beautifully stacked piles of birch and set a fire. My little boy is barefoot on the moss-scarred granite, singing to himself, a sure sign of happiness. The lie of our hardscrabble fisherman’s life floats further off when Gustav Eriksson arrives at the wheel of a rigid inflatable wearing a chef’s jacket. Chef at Silverskär’s hotel on another island, he makes us a dinner of goosander eggs, hogget shoulder boiled in local apple juice, and sea buckthorn crème brûlée.

He tells us he is a proud purveyor of new Nordic cooking. “I love the idea of catch and cook,” he says. Then he packs our gas-fired fridge with an astonishing smorgasbord for breakfast and leaves us utterly alone.

I walk down to the sauna naked, the silence broken only by the ducks. Afterwards I sit on the rocks, the tingle of cold saltwater on my baked skin as the never-ending northern sunset creates a champagne sky. I remember Turrell’s Skyspace, setting it against the infinity of tones in front of me.

The following day we rejoin the Viking Grace and sail on to Turku, on the Finnish mainland. Our hotel is a repurposed jail, a discordant note after the freedom of the cabins. We take a cab to Kasnäs, a two-hour drive through a forest that finally crumbles and flakes into the Baltic.

Here Aleksi waits. His father had a boat and used it to explore, says the designer from Helsinki. “I thought I could try it,” he says. “I ended up in this area, spending days on empty islands.” Finns have a right to roam, to pick mushrooms and berries, but he says few know their archipelago well, preferring the less challenging lakelands.

We jump into his tender and follow channels past communities that reach back to Viking times. As we pull up at Skjulskäret, Aleksi’s singular vision stands above us. The cabin is supermodel slim, the end all glass. This turns out to be the sauna, orientated to the sunset. There is a crevice in the rock pumped full of seawater, creating a hot tub heated by its own fire.

Having stocked up in a market in Turku, we cook for ourselves. But, one night, Janne Tirkkonen, who runs a hotel on the nearby island of Örö — once a fortress covering the seaways to St Petersburg — arrives to make us dinner of white-tailed deer, which swim from island to island.

Camila, who is Cuban, is entranced by the image of the swimming deer, just as she was by the story of a wolf that walked over the ice to Åland last winter. “In the Caribbean we talk of an archipelagic way of thinking,” she says. “But this is the first true archipelago I’ve seen.”

Aleksi’s restless imagination displays itself in the paths he’s made around his island’s five acres, wooden ladders climbing boulders and bridges crossing ravines. He, his wife Milla and their son Hugo were confined on Skjulskäret during the pandemic, which seems to have supercharged his obsessive building.

There’s only room for one family, but there are seats and fire pits in every nook. Yet he knows when to leave alone — such as an enchanted forest at the island’s centre. It is also a home, very uniquely theirs. A tiny bed slots satisfyingly at the foot of our own, perfect for our boy. The unguents in the shower and sauna carry the scent of rock, forest and sea, making the experience entire.

Aleksi only bought the island in 2018, but Project Ö has already wowed the design magazines and so, like the white-tailed deer, he is moving across the water. He’s secured a lease on the island of Gåsskären, a treeless skerry at the furthest edge of the archipelago. He drops us off, the first guests.

A traditional fishing hut is tucked out of the wind, but the interior is all Aleksi: warm woods, Hans-Agne Jakobsson lamps and the first bunk-double-bed I’ve ever seen.

He has yet to create his paths, so we clamber. It’s how I imagine Tove Jansson’s island of Klovharun, which she described as “shattered craggy chaos”. A snake suns itself on the rocks, a swan shifts on its nest, and an eagle watches from an outcrop.

In the twilight of late evening I sit on the bare grey rocks. The sky turns grey. The sea is grey. I recall Aleksi saying this is how he likes it and when I asked why, he’d replied simply: “There’s nothing to break the harmony.”

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