Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music.
To get to Kumlinge, one of the thousands of islands that make up the autonomous Finnish region of Åland, which sits between Stockholm and Helsinki, visitors traverse the archipelago’s vast network of waterways and bridges. Tourists staying in the remote spot, which has a total of 200 year-round residents, often sleep in cabins or on boats, but Kumlinge is also home to a design destination: Hotel Svala, founded by the mother-daughter team of Jannika and Sage Reed in 2019.
Sage, 48, was raised in New Mexico but grew up visiting her Finnish grandparents, who moved around Europe. Jannika, 71, an avid house renovator and gardener, relocated to Åland in 2013 to take care of her aging mother, who’d settled there. When, a few years later, Jannika proposed buying an old hotel on Kumlinge that she’d seen for sale, Sage was skeptical. She was working as a photo stylist and experiential designer in Chicago, which involved, at various times, designing sets for Philip Glass and Oprah Winfrey, building pop-ups for New York Fashion Week and making art installations for brand activations. Eventually, however, she was won over by the prospect of creating something more lasting and personal. With the help of friends, the women tore down walls to open up the Art Deco building, a former country hospital erected in the 1930s and expanded in the ’70s. They chose paint colors that borrow from the surrounding environment — soft blue and pink that mimic the skies, reedy green and brick red that recalls the area’s many boathouses — and filled the rooms with pieces from their extensive collection of vintage furnishings and objects, from circa 1969 black leather Remmi chairs by the Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro to a sculptural ’80s-era birch veneer Nest sofa by the Finnish designer Antti Evävaara. They named the place Svala after the Swedish word for the swallow, which in Scandinavian folklore symbolizes good fortune and safe return. The pair hope that, like the migrating bird, their guests will find them again and again.
This June, in the lead-up to midsummer, Sage hosted an early version of the Scandinavian holiday, a celebration of the summer solstice, inviting former guests with whom they’d become close for a dinner that highlighted both the season’s bounty (leeks, lilacs) and the sense of ease and togetherness that the Reeds love to foster. When they were buying the hotel, Sage says, “we joked about how we could end up with the coolest, biggest summer house for all our friends.” As the group gathered at a long table on that sun-soaked night, it felt like that was exactly what had happened.
The attendees: Most of the 14 attendees traveled from Helsinki, to the island’s east, or Stockholm, to its west. There was also an American, the writer Dana Covit, 36, who came by way of Greece. Also among the crowd were Laura Väinölä, 42, the Finnish art director of Marimekko; her husband, the Finnish film director Ezra Gould, 40; the Swedish weaver Miriam Parkman, 34; Annika Rantala, 51, a Finnish fashion stylist; Nils-Johan Eriksson, 39, a painter who was born and raised in Åland; and his wife, Fernanda Barbato, 45, a UX designer originally from Brazil. Many of the diners were staying at the hotel, which has four to nine bedrooms depending on the season and occasion. “I never wanted this place to be bigger than as many people could sit down at a table together,” Sage says.
The table: Given her professional experience, Sage knows how to orchestrate an elaborate display, but she decided to let this event be simple and free-spirited. Mismatched chairs were gathered from inside the hotel — including a Knoll Handkerchief chair by the Italian designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli and Elefantti chairs by the Finnish designer Esko Pajamies for Asko — and the long table was set with vintage smoked wineglasses Sage had bought on her way home from a square dance in Indiana; dishes by the Finnish ceramist Mia Englund, who has family on Kumlinge; glass Bölgeblick bowls by the Finnish architect Aino Aalto meant to evoke ripples on the surface of water; and plates from Ikea. Arrangements of poppies and rhododendrons added color.
A second, smaller table served as a buffet. It was covered with pink linen cloths and accented with an allium- and foliage-filled vase borrowed from the Stockholm-based artist Anni Eckerman. Just before the meal got started, Sage had the idea to place an enormous rhubarb leaf beneath a serving platter as decoration.
The food: Food is a focus at the hotel. Jannika cooks breakfasts (a menu might feature rye porridge with compotes and jams, almond granola, smoked fish with knäckebröd — Swedish crisp bread — and a frittata with leeks and cabbage), and Sage makes the communal prix fixe dinners, all of them showcasing local, seasonal ingredients. For this dinner, the spread included warm Alderwood smoked salmon; grilled leeks; new potatoes; gravad sik (cured whitefish) infused with lemon, lime and orange zest and served with shaved fennel and horseradish; quail eggs; quick pickles; malted black bread from Dansös Gård, a bakery located on a farm on the island; whole cod fire-roasted on pine branches; and nettle pasta with butter. “We picked the nettles day of, and the local butter is a thing of legends,” says Sage.
For extra hands in the kitchen, she leaned on her neighbor Benita Björke, 73, who was born at the hotel back when it was a hospital, and the chef Viktor Eriksson, 36, who lives a few islands over on Brändö and brought venison tartare, which they served with wild garlic flowers Sage had foraged and pickled. All the fish came from local waters, and Eriksson hunted the deer himself. Dessert, which the crowd ate while basking in the midnight sun on the front patio, was an olive oil cake with rose cream and fresh Åland strawberries.
The drinks: The night before the event, Sage and Anna Holm, 38, a Swedish guest and amateur mixologist, started experimenting with ideas for cocktails using syrups made from pine cones, spruce tips, lilacs, rhubarb, elderflowers and black currants. They landed on a woodsy old-fashioned, a floral gimlet and a Chimayó, a tequila cocktail first popularized in Sage’s home state of New Mexico that they made with apple juice from a local orchard. There was also a rhubarb fizz featuring the Under Ytan craft soda Eriksson makes with seaweed harvested at his farm. Guests were also offered organic wine pairings with dinner and, in typical midsummer fashion, toasted with glasses of aquavit: Sage infuses hers with dill, star anise, orange peel and pink peppercorn.
The music: Niklas Betan, 40, a Swedish record collector who’s partial to ’70s-era 45s he finds at flea markets, served as the event’s cowboy boot-wearing D.J. His playlist featured dansbandmusik (upbeat Swedish songs meant to drive listeners to the dance floor), country and Scandinavian covers of “You’re So Vain,” “Lady Marmalade” and “Life on Mars?” — hits that were recognizable even to those who didn’t speak the language they were being sung in.
The conversation: In addition to exclamations about the food and design industry chatter, there was talk of politics, the history of Kumlinge families, the traditional Finnish method of cooking a fish over an open fire and the best places to go swimming on and near the island. Sage likes the black volcanic cliffs on Snäckö, which is reachable from Kumlinge by bridge.
An entertaining tip: In all that she does, Sage relishes collaboration — she never pursued becoming a fine artist, she says, because rather than control every detail, she wanted to leave room to be inspired by others. Naturally, then, she recommends tapping into your guests’ talents. In the hours before the dinner, the group had a kind of preparty during which Rantala and Väinölä helped style and set the dinner tables, Holm and her husband, Christopher Mair, 43, who’s also from Sweden, made everyone lunch (sandwiches and apple spritzers) and Parkman and Betan assisted with last-minute tasks in the garden. In Sage’s view, this forges a different kind of experience, one that allows guests to become embedded in the place and make collective memories. As she says, “Kids were running around, the dog was running around, people were dancing, the cake was being made. The space was alive and it felt really good.”
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