My high-ceiling room was in the original part of the building where all the rooms were once pen pushers’ offices. The room retained touches of early 20th-century furnishing – chunky iron radiators and a herringbone oak floor, while the view over the railway station square was an architectural sweep across the ages – Helsinki’s iconic Art Nouveau clock tower dressed in red granite and lit magenta at night, the 1887 Neo-Renaissance Art Museum, and Helsinki’s most popular department store, Stockmann, in 1920s Art Deco. 

A new annex has added 118 rooms behind the original building to create a courtyard into which tables flow from their new brasserie. There’s a sunning area, too, for those exiting the basement sauna. A few white-robed Finns braved the cold, displaying their legendary sisu. Yet the new wing is faithful in design to the four-storey original because this is one of Finland’s most protected buildings. It marks the transcendence from the rustic medieval motifs of modern romanticism (all bears and gargoyles), widespread in Helsinki, to the rationalised sleekness of Art Nouveau as local architects looked towards America and Central European Jugendstil. 

Eliel Saarinen won a competition to design the hotel in 1904. “His rivals were jealous, criticising his original modern romantic design proposal, saying it wasn’t forward-looking,” said Sari Saarinen, who showed me around. Eliel was her grandfather’s uncle. “He went away and travelled and came back with the revised plans, more modern.”