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Nanny Still
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Nanny Still was born in Helsinki in 1926 and showed an early aptitude for applied arts that led her to enroll at the Central School of Industrial Arts in 1945. She initially entered the art teacher program before transferring to the metal arts department, where she developed the material sensibility that would define her career. By the time she graduated in 1949, she had secured a position at Riihimaen Lasi Oy, the Riihimaki glassworks in southern Finland, beginning a partnership that would last until the factory discontinued hand-blown production in 1976.
Over those 27 years Still became the most prolific designer in the factory's history, working across art glass, functional tableware, decanters, and decorative objects. Her palette was saturated and unapologetic, petrol blues and greens, amber, smoky topaz, deployed across forms that balanced Scandinavian restraint with a more tactile, southern European warmth. The Harlekiini series of 1958, its color combination reportedly inspired by a fragment of glass she found on Capri, is among the clearest expressions of that tension.
The Flindari series (1964-1966) extended her vocabulary further. Bottles, vases, and tumblers were pattern-molded after a second layer of glass was applied, producing a dipped, textured surface that caught light differently at every angle. The Flindari decanter won the AID International Design Award in 1965, and the Grapponia series of 1968 cemented her international reputation.
In 1958 Still married American businessman George McKinney and the following year moved to Belgium, where she would live for the rest of her life. Working from Brussels did not interrupt her output for Riihimaen Lasi, and she simultaneously developed collaborations with Belgian manufacturers including Val Saint-Lambert and Cerabel, as well as German firms Heinrich and Rosenthal.
In 1972 she was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal, one of Finland's highest cultural distinctions. She died in 2009.
At auction, Still's work appears most often at Finnish and Swedish houses, with Hagelstam and Co and Bukowskis Helsinki together accounting for a substantial share of her Nordic market. Glass dominates, with the highest prices achieved by rare studio pieces. A signed studio work reached 3,800 EUR at recent sale, while Grapponia and Flindari decanters in desirable colorways consistently attract competition.