I still remember the first time I sat on my own terrace. It was late May 2021, the birch trees had just leafed out overnight (as they do here — bare branches one day, full canopy the next), and I was sitting on a €12 camping chair from Biltema with a coffee in my hand. The terrace was bare concrete, roughly 14 square meters, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Four years later, that same terrace is the room I’m proudest of in my entire home. Not the kitchen I spent months agonizing over. Not the bedroom with the carefully curated gallery wall. The terrace. Because in Finland, outdoor space isn’t just nice to have — it’s the thing that carries you through summer like a life raft.
Why Terrace Season Is Sacred in Finland
If you don’t live in the Nordics, this might sound dramatic. But when you’ve survived five months of darkness where the sun sets at 3pm and temperatures hover around -15°C, the arrival of May changes your brain chemistry. I’m not exaggerating. The light returns, it stays until nearly midnight, and suddenly everyone in Helsinki is outside. Terraces at restaurants fill up the second temperatures hit 12°C. People sit in parks wrapped in blankets because being outdoors matters more than being warm.
So when I say terrace season — roughly May through September — is sacred, I mean it the way Italians mean Sunday lunch. It’s non-negotiable. And if you have your own terrace or balcony, you owe it to those five golden months to make the space as good as it can possibly be.
My terrace went through three distinct phases over the years. Phase one: the sad camping chair era. Phase two: the “I bought too many things at IKEA in one trip” era. Phase three: where I am now, with pieces I genuinely love and a layout that makes sense. I want to save you from phases one and two.
Choosing Furniture That Survives Nordic Weather
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you start buying outdoor furniture in Finland: you’re not shopping for summer. You’re shopping for a piece that needs to handle blazing July sun, sideways autumn rain, and potentially being buried under snow if you can’t store it. That €200 rattan set from the garden center? It will look exhausted by August.
Materials That Actually Hold Up
Powder-coated aluminum is my top recommendation for the main furniture. It’s light enough to move around, doesn’t rust, and handles freeze-thaw cycles without cracking. The HAY Palissade collection is the gold standard here — I have their dining bench (around €399) and two chairs, and after three Finnish summers they look identical to the day I bought them. The steel is thick, the powder coating is excellent, and the design is so clean it works whether your terrace is modern or traditional.
Teak is the classic choice, and there’s a reason for that. My dining table is teak — I found it secondhand on Tori.fi for €280, which was a steal considering new teak tables start around €600-800 at Vepsäläinen. Untreated teak silvers beautifully over time. I oiled mine with Osmo teak oil the first year, then gave up and let it grey. It looks better this way, honestly. More honest.
What I’d avoid: Anything with wicker or synthetic rattan weave as the primary structural material. Resin wicker chairs are fine as occasional seating, but I’ve watched two neighbors go through sets in two years. The weave loosens in cold, tightens in heat, and eventually just pops apart. Also avoid cheap steel that isn’t powder-coated — rust appears within weeks of the first autumn rain.
My Actual Furniture Picks
For lounging, the Fiam Fiesta sun lounger changed my summer. I discovered Fiam through an Italian furniture exhibition here in Helsinki — their pieces are designed and manufactured in Lombardy, and there’s something about Italian craftsmanship meeting a Finnish summer that just works. The Fiesta is lightweight aluminium with a Textilene mesh that dries in minutes after rain. At around €350, it’s an investment, but I’ve used it roughly 300 hours across two summers. That’s a little over a euro per hour of lying in the golden evening sun reading. Worth it.
For dining, the IKEA ÄPPLARÖ series gets unfair criticism from design snobs. The drop-leaf table (about €99) is solid acacia wood, folds down for winter storage, and seats four comfortably when extended. I paired mine with the matching folding chairs. Four years on, with occasional oiling, the set is fine. Not breathtaking, but fine. And at a fraction of what designer outdoor furniture costs, it let me spend the savings on things that matter more — good textiles, lighting, plants.
For accent seating, I have a HAY Palissade lounge chair low (around €455) that lives in the sunny corner. It’s where I drink my morning coffee from roughly May 15th until the weather turns. Every single euro justified.
Creating Zones on a Small Terrace
My terrace is about 3.5m × 4m. Not huge. But by thinking about it as three overlapping zones rather than one undifferentiated space, it feels twice as large.
The Dining Zone
Positioned closest to the kitchen door for practical reasons (carrying plates, drinks, the inevitable forgotten salt). The teak table and ÄPPLARÖ chairs sit here, with a simple cotton runner I swap out seasonally. Summer gets a striped linen runner from Lapuan Kankurit — their washed linen holds up remarkably well outdoors if you bring it in when it rains.
The Lounging Zone
The opposite corner from dining, where the Fiam lounger and the Palissade low chair create a more relaxed feel. A small side table (mine is a concrete-look fiber cement cube from Plantagen, about €45) holds drinks and books. This is the sunset corner, which I figured out after living with the space for one full summer before committing to the layout.
The Reading Nook
The smallest zone — really just a single deep armchair I drag out from the living room on warm evenings, a floor cushion, and a clip-on reading light. It’s tucked against the wall where the building provides shelter from wind. Having this semi-private pocket within the terrace makes the whole space feel more varied.
The trick is allowing zones to blur. The lounger sometimes gets pulled to the dining table when we have guests. The reading chair migrates to catch the last patch of sun. Rigid layouts look great in magazines but don’t work in real life on a 14m² terrace.
Lighting: The Thing That Makes Everything
I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it: lighting is what separates a terrace you use until 8pm from a terrace you use until midnight. And in June, when the Finnish sky barely darkens, the right lighting isn’t about illumination — it’s about atmosphere.
String lights are the backbone. I use warm white LED string lights (2700K, always 2700K — anything cooler looks institutional) strung in two lines across the terrace at about 2.2m height. I got mine from Clas Ohlson for around €25 for a 10m strand. They’ve survived three winters hung up because I was too lazy to take them down, and they still work. IP44 rated at minimum for outdoor use.
Lanterns create pools of softer light at table level. I have three from IKEA (the GODAFTON LED candle lanterns, about €15 each) and one larger brass lantern I found at a flea market in Kallio. The mix of heights and materials matters — uniform lanterns look like a hotel terrace.
Solar path lights are hit or miss in Finland. They work beautifully in June and July when there’s enough sunlight to charge them. By August they’re already struggling, and by September they’re decorative objects that happen to flicker occasionally. I keep two along the terrace edge but don’t rely on them.
Skip anything that requires running extension cables across the terrace unless you can do it neatly through a cable channel. Nothing ruins a terrace aesthetic faster than an orange extension cord taped to the floor.
Textiles and the Art of Outdoor Coziness
Scandinavians have a complicated relationship with outdoor textiles because our weather is complicated. You want the terrace to feel soft and inviting. You also know that a surprise rainstorm can roll in from the Baltic in twenty minutes and soak everything.
My approach: keep indoor-quality textiles near the door where you can grab them quickly, and use truly outdoor-rated fabrics for anything that stays out permanently.
Seat cushions on the dining chairs are Fermob outdoor cushions with Sunbrella fabric — they can take rain and dry fast. Not cheap at around €45 each, but they’ve lasted four years without fading. For throws and blankets, I keep a stack of Klippan wool blankets just inside the door. They come out on cool evenings, wrap around shoulders, and go back inside after. This system is more effort than leaving cushions everywhere, but it means nothing smells of mildew by July.
One thing that made a huge difference: an outdoor rug. Mine is a flatweave polypropylene rug from IKEA (MORUM, 160×230cm, about €49), and it defines the lounging area while being completely rain-proof. I hose it off every few weeks. It makes the terrace feel like a room rather than a platform.
Plant Styling on the Terrace
Plants deserve their own complete treatment, and I’ve gone deep on container gardening in my guide to modern planters and container gardening. But for terrace-specific styling, here are my rules:
Vary the heights aggressively. I have a tall fiber cement planter (80cm) with ornamental grass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light’), medium terracotta pots at 35-40cm with herbs and smaller perennials, and low bowls (15cm) with succulents and sedums by the sunny wall. The height variation creates a sense of lushness even with just 8-10 containers.
Cluster rather than distribute. Three or four pots grouped together at different heights looks intentional. One pot in each corner looks like a waiting room. I keep one main cluster by the dining area and a secondary grouping near the lounging zone.
Include at least one scented plant near where you sit most. I have a potted Syringa meyeri ‘Palibin’ (dwarf lilac, found at Viherlandia for €28) that blooms in June and fills the whole terrace with scent on warm evenings. A single lavender plant does similar work from July onwards.
Storing It All Through a Nordic Winter
This is the part that never makes it into international terrace styling guides, because most of them assume you live somewhere that doesn’t regularly hit -20°C. In Finland, winter storage isn’t optional — it’s part of the furniture decision.
My storage strategy: aluminum and steel furniture stays out, covered with fitted furniture covers (about €30-60 from Jysk or Plantagen). I tried going without covers for one winter and the cleaning in spring took an entire afternoon. Not again. The teak table stays out uncovered — teak handles Finnish winters, and the spring cleaning is just a scrub with soapy water.
Cushions, textiles, and the outdoor rug go into a Keter 455L deck storage box (around €90 from K-Rauta) that lives on the terrace. It’s not the most beautiful object, but I positioned it against the wall and put a cushion on top, so it doubles as extra seating in summer.
Lanterns and small decor items come inside. The string lights, as I mentioned, stay up year-round. Call it lazy or call it optimistic.
If you’re limited on storage — say, an apartment with a small balcony and no storage room — folding furniture isn’t a compromise, it’s the smart choice. The ÄPPLARÖ folding chairs stack flat and fit in a closet. A folding bistro table takes up about 15cm of wall space. The Fermob Bistro set is gorgeous for this purpose if your budget stretches to around €300 for table and two chairs.
What I’d Do Differently
If I started from scratch today, knowing what I know now, three things would change:
I’d measure obsessively before buying anything. My first furniture arrangement left a 40cm gap between the table and the lounging area that was too narrow to walk through comfortably but too wide to ignore. I moved everything twice before finding the right layout. A simple sketch on graph paper with measurements would have saved hours.
I’d invest in the lounge chair first, not the dining set. I eat on the terrace maybe three times a week in summer. I sit in the lounge chair every single day. The item you use most should be the item you love most.
I’d think about wind from day one. Helsinki is not a calm city. The sea brings wind that funnels between buildings in ways you don’t expect. My first set of string lights came down in a June storm because I’d attached them with simple hooks. Now I use proper cable clips and tensioning wire. Lightweight items need either weight or secure fastening. The beautiful paper lantern I hung up in my first summer lasted approximately one and a half evenings.
A Terrace Is a Room Without a Roof
That’s how I think about it now. Same care goes into choosing pieces, same attention to how light falls throughout the day, same consideration of flow and function. The only difference is the ceiling is the sky and the walls are optional.
If you’re just starting out, focus on one good seating piece, good lighting, and a few well-chosen planters. You can add and refine over years — I certainly did, and the gradual building of the space is part of what makes it feel so personal now.
And keep an eye on how your interior style connects to your outdoor space. The principles of Scandinavian design — simplicity, natural materials, function first — translate beautifully to outdoor living. If anything, they work better outside, where the natural materials are surrounded by actual nature.
The camping chair, by the way, still exists. I keep it in the storage room for when we have too many guests on the terrace and need one more seat. It’s terrible and I love it. It reminds me that a terrace doesn’t need to be perfect to be used. It just needs to be yours.
As the seasons shift and those late September evenings start to cool, the terrace becomes something else again — a place for wool blankets and warm drinks, for watching the leaves turn and soaking up the last golden hours before the dark months. I’ve written more about navigating that seasonal transition from summer to autumn in your home, and honestly, the terrace is where I feel the shift most acutely. But that’s a conversation for another time. Right now, it’s July, the sun won’t set until 11pm, and I have a lounger calling my name.
