Maija-Liisa Komulainen, known to her peers as Maikki, was born on 29 January 1922 in Kajaani, Finland. She graduated from the Institute of Crafts and Design in Helsinki in 1949 and opened her own practice in the city the following year, where she would remain for the next seventeen years.
She came of age professionally at a fortunate moment. Finland’s postwar furniture industry was expanding rapidly — public buildings needed furnishing, exports were growing, and graduates with the right training found work. Komulainen was among a cohort of designers from her era who each carved out an individual field: an oral history recorded by furniture designer Olli Mannermaa in 1990 names her alongside fellow students Olavi Hänninen, Jorma Valve, Marja Leskinen, and Sirkka Pohjonen as part of a generation that helped build Finnish design’s international standing from within.
Her furniture work was varied and technically confident. She designed seating in wood, wicker, and metal — lounge chairs, sofas, and cane pieces — some produced for Uusi Koti–Nya Hemmet. A cane hanging chair is documented in photographs courtesy of Reino Komulainen, suggesting a family connection to the craft. In 1960 she filed a US patent for a lounging chair — Patent No. 3,072,435 — assigned to Stephen B. Tanner of Bethesda, Maryland. The design uses paired semi-circular runners as a base, with seat and back sections integrally connected, producing a low rocking form that reads as a direct forerunner of the sculptural seating that would define the decade.
The commission that gave her the most lasting visibility in Helsinki came in the late 1950s, when she was engaged — together with Sylvi Kekkonen, wife of President Urho Kekkonen — to refurnish Tamminiemi, the presidential residence. The existing interior had been dominated by faux rococo furniture; the two replaced it with a modernised scheme that reflected the confidence Finnish design culture was developing in that period.
By the early 1960s, Komulainen had moved into lighting, and it is here that her reputation has proved most durable. A French design publication from the period groups her with C. Colombo of Milan as among the first designers to seriously tackle the problem of integrating lighting into modern interiors — how to avoid the anachronism of traditional lampshades on contemporary furniture. Her solutiom, developed for the Amsterdam manufacturer Raak, was a series of metal light objects that used concealed or indirect sources to produce atmospheric illumination rather than direct light. The Fuga wall light — a cluster of aluminium tubes configured to resemble organ pipes, finished in copper-coloured anodised aluminium with white enamel interiors — became her signature piece and one of Raak’s most commercially successful designs. She was described in the trade as a central figure in the Raak design team, placing her in the company of Tapio Wirkkala and Italian designers such as Sergio Asti among the manufacturer’s international contributors. The Chantarelle, a floor and table lamp inspired by the mushroom form in anodised aluminium, followed from the same period and the same relationship with Raak.
In 1967 she left Helsinki and relocated to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where she founded Estudio de Interiores together with Li Helo, a French-Finnish designer she had worked alongside in Finland. The studio operated from the Francisco Gourie area of Las Palmas. Her Helsinki address at the time of departure was Linnankoskenkatu 3, and she retained her professional memberships in the Finnish Association of Interior Architects SIO and the designer association ORNAMO. What the studio produced in Gran Canaria, who its clients were, and how long it continued to operate are not documented in any source currently available.
- Maija-Liisa ‘Maikki’ Komulainen
- Born in 1922
- Silver medals for her exhibits at the internationales in Paris in 1954 and in Brussels in 1955.
- Interior decorator for numerous commercial and residential buildings in Helsinki
- Founded Estudio de Interiores in 1967 on Gran Canaria