A concept studio for wellness, hospitality and premium brands.
Studio Toivakka designs and builds the concepts, spaces and partnerships behind wellness, hospitality and premium consumer brands.
We’ve spent 15+ years inside wellness studios, longevity clinics and premium hotels. We know that world well, and we’ve watched it change.
The projects don’t look alike. A hotel, a yacht, a consumer product, an event. It’s always wellness, or something premium. A beautiful detail that doesn’t pay for itself is just decoration.
Tell us what you’re working on →What we do
We work with people who share our standards.
Founders with a new product or a new service, and the people running longevity clinics, wellness studios, hotels and destinations. Managing directors, heads of marketing, the people developing the concept, and property developers.
The work has taken us all over Europe. We’ve never had one clear market, and we’ve come to see that as the strength. The advantage is cultural. We’ve studied and worked in these markets, and we know how the same space gets read in each of them.
Founders with a product or a service that doesn’t exist yet
That means market research, brand building from scratch, and working out what the product should actually be for the people you’re aiming at. Then getting it into the markets we know well.
What you getThe concept and the brand, worked out to the point where they can be built, and a way into the markets we know. Usually one defined project.
Longevity clinics, wellness studios, hotels and destinations that want to go further
We look at what’s there, what its guests actually want, and what it can honestly claim. Then we rebuild the offer around that. The program, the partners, the pricing, and how it’s sold.
What you getThe rebuilt offer, the partners to run it with, and your own team trained to carry it. Either as a defined project, or as advisory alongside your own people.
How we work
Three stages, and most of the work is in the last one.
We start with the people who actually use the place, we design the concept with your senior management in the room from day one, and the work is finished when the people running the place every day can explain the concept themselves.
Who actually walks through the door
Take a hotel. Many don’t know their customers well enough. In wellness, a fifth of the people using the spa can be locals who’ve never booked a room. So we start there, and we spend time in the building rather than reading about it.
The other half is the place itself. What works in one country lands differently in the next. A spa in Stockholm has a better story outside its own window than in a mood borrowed from Kyoto. We build it with the people already working there. They usually know what the place needs.
The offer, the partners and the pricing, together
This is where the concept takes shape: what the place offers, which partners it brings in, what it charges and how it’s sold. We work those out together, not one after the other, because the commercial case is part of the concept.
Getting it down to the floor
Training decides whether any of it works, and it’s usually the part that gets the least time. We write it into the role at hiring, so nobody finds out afterwards that it’s part of the job.
We don’t run this from an office. We’ve done manager-on-duty weekends and turndown rounds with housekeeping. The best ideas we took to the board came from people on those shifts, and we credited them.
Foresight
We’ve usually been a step ahead.
- Twelve years ago we designed boutique fitness classes for yachts, when they only existed in boutique fitness studios in France.
- Ten years ago we designed some of the first boutique fitness studios in Finland, when there weren’t any here.
- Eight years ago we built a monthly subscription wellness service for mothers, long before those platforms existed.
- We built a members’ club into a hotel, Soho House style, one of the first of its kind in Finland.
- We brought in a recovery room that other Northern European hotels took inspiration from.
What we think is coming
- The biggest shift in travel is the woman going away on her own for a week, to move and to be looked after. That market is going to get a lot bigger.
- Longevity medicine is moving into premium travel. Scans, bloodwork, the things you’d normally book at home, done while you’re away.
- Premium is getting less polished. Marble and gloss are everywhere now, so the places worth paying for are the ones with a character of their own. It’ll show in the materials first.
- Wellness is moving into housing. Not the gym in the basement. A spa that matches the best anywhere, a gym designed to the last detail, and premium medical care in the building.
The one we can show
Waldorf Astoria Helsinki
We built the wellness concept from nothing. There was no Finnish reference to benchmark against, so we looked all over the world. It’s now Waldorf Astoria Helsinki, the first in the Nordics.
It started as a consulting job at The Hotel Maria, years before the hotel opened. Everything after that started from zero. The colors, the tone of voice, all of it, and we were in that work from the start.
We ran a tender for the gym equipment and met every supplier in person. We designed the concept ourselves and took no outside design help. We chose a smaller Finnish one over the big ones, because we wanted every partner to be a small specialist who’s the best at what they do.
Then we trained the hotel’s teams to five-star standards.
What people say
“She joined years before we opened and built the Wellness Club and the Wellness Concierge from nothing, benchmarking internationally because there was no Finnish reference to work from.”Entrepreneur, investor and board professional
More from the people she’s worked with →
Work we’ve been part of has appeared in Vogue Scandinavia · The New York Times · Financial Times · Condé Nast Traveller · Monocle · Robb Report
A service we can build for you
Wellness Concierge
“The only hotel in the Nordics offering guests a bespoke wellness concierge service.”Jenna Toivakka on The Hotel Maria, quoted in Vogue Scandinavia, April 2024
It starts with a conversation before the guest ever arrives, a consultation that works out what they actually want from the stay: their goals, how they eat, how much time they have. The concierge builds the rest around that.
Personalized routes to walk or run, restaurant and café recommendations with reservations made for them, a breakfast built to match how they eat or how they want to feel, every spa and fitness booking handled on their behalf. A wellness menu and alcohol-free health drinks run through the hotel, and guests can add a personal training session or try emerging wellness products through the hotel’s brand partnerships.
For jet lag or real recovery, there are set programs. The aim is that guests leave better than they arrived, proof that travel itself can add to wellbeing, not take from it.
A person runs it, not a screen. That’s the part guests remember.
We built this from nothing at The Hotel Maria, when nothing comparable existed anywhere in Europe. The model isn’t hotel-specific either: it works in private clubs, branded residences and spas, and we’ve since sketched it out for several more hotels.
Building it for your place runs in three parts. An audit of what you have and what your guests actually want. The concept and the service itself: the offer, the partners, the pricing and how it’s sold. Then training and launch.
Ask about the Wellness Concierge →
Partners and brands
A partnership only works if the other side gets something out of it too.
Small specialists who are the best at what they do
Hercule Studio, when they’d only just started with a small presence in the south of France. Pent Fitness, whose small, beautiful products we chose and negotiated for. Fysioline, a Finnish family firm that won on attitude rather than on price.
Partnerships that mean something
The kind that brought international premium brands to the table, not just a logo on a wall.
That’s a different job from choosing a supplier. There we’re selling, and negotiating the price.
The rest of the work
Most projects are smaller than the hotel. That’s usually the work we’re closest to.
A lot of it’s about taking something that already exists further. A spa that needs rethinking. A wellness studio that wants to rebrand. We design wellness spaces from the start too. Hotels, yachts, private homes.
Events are a different job altogether. Years of designing them the hard way — intimate, high-touch, no detail too small. Retreats abroad, weddings at a luxury hotel, dozens of smaller gatherings where every guest actually matters. Brand launches, openings, wellness events. They usually bring the press side with them too.
Some of it we can talk about. Some of it we can’t. A lot of the work sits under agreements that don’t allow names. That’s the trade for being in the room early. There’s usually more we can say about a project than we can write here.
Get in touch
What are you working on?
If you’re building something in this space and missing the piece that ties concept to commercial reality, that’s the gap we fill.
We’re after places people leave feeling better than when they arrived, and work that’s still standing in ten years. It has to pay for itself, or it doesn’t get built at all.
Write a few lines about the place, the stage it’s at, and what you’re after. We’ll get back to you and set up a first conversation.
jenna@studiotoivakka.com