The 2025 Habitare Neighbours area to be designed by Laura Seppänen
The Neighbours area will be reconceived this year by one of Finland’s most famous interior designers, Laura Seppänen. Habitare, the leading furniture, design and interior decoration event in the Nordic countries, will be held at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre from 10 to 14 September 2025.
The idea of the Neighbours area, featured for the first time at Habitare in 2024, is to present an image or mood of a yard area of a residential block that lives and evolves with its residents. The home is a space and a mood – a safe haven for its occupants, and a place for gatherings and encounters, but also somewhere to retreat to and spend personal time.
Laura Seppänen, who will design the next instalment of the well-received Habitare Neighbours area, is one of Finland’s most famous interior designers, known for her bold, distinctive style.
“Habitare’s theme of Touch led me to reflect on Isaac Newton's third law of motion, which can be expanded to mean ‘you cannot touch without being touched’. I believe that in our surface-driven time, many of us have a strong yearning for a connection, to touch and be touched”, she says, and adds:
“I’ve always been interested in how built spaces guide our behaviour. Everything that we see communicates something to our brain. This means that the visual choices in spaces have a significant influence on, for example, our routines and, through this, on our future as a whole. In my design of the Habitare Neighbours area, I want to return to human-sized things and objects that are meaningful on an everyday scale. Everyday emotional memories can still touch us years after being formed.”
The Neighbours themed exhibition will present today’s design and materials, as well as topics related to homes, interior decoration and construction. The area will provide an opportunity to explore how people’s personalities and life situations, time, and emotions are reflected in the home, what creates the mood of the home, and how the spaces within the walls are adapted for a variety of lifestyles. The Habitare 2025 theme of Touch shows in the material choices, contrasts and layers of the area; Neighbours also invites you to touch and experience the spaces.
“The Neighbours house is like a friend’s new home, where you can visit, be yourself, and spend leisurely time. You can touch everything, you can ask questions about everything. The Neighbours concept invites you to explore home design dreams, as it offers the beginning of a story for the imagination to run with”, says the creative lead at Habitare, Päivi Helander.
@laura.seppanen @lsdesignagency I lauraseppanen.com
More information:
Pia Sievinen, communication & brand, Habitare, tel. +358 40 559 9155, pia.sievinen@messukeskus.com
Images of Habitare 2025 can be downloaded here.
Habitare, the leading furniture, design and interior event in the Nordics, will next be held at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre from 10 to 14 September 2025. | habitare.fi | @habitarefair | #habitare2025
