Ikea is anything but a “simple” cheap furniture factory, and has not just come up with the idea of selling disassembled products. It is about design in its noblest aspects - above all democratisation - which the Swedish brand has honoured over the years by tackling the subject in all its variations: products, systems, spaces, communication, user experience. It has courageously anticipated issues that are now taken for granted, and has managed to maintain a presence that goes beyond chipboard and Allen wafers, so much so that today there is an exhibition in London dedicated exclusively to the blue plastic bag that people leave department stores with at the end of the day.
Vintage Ikea: 5 pieces of furniture that never went out of style are back on sale
High prices on the second-hand market and a blossoming passion for archives in fashion and design were the signs that called for the return of furniture from the past. Here is the best of Nytillverkad's collection.
Courtesy Ikea
Ikea catalogue 1985
Courtesy Ikea
Ikea catalogue 1956
Courtesy Ikea
Courtesy Ikea
Courtesy Ikea
Courtesy Ikea
Courtesy Ikea
Ikea catalogue 1973
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- La redazione di Domus
- 31 January 2025
The truth is that nomadic design, fluid design, transformable design, collapsible design, foldable design, and all the other concepts that smack of pandemics and coronaviruses, Ikea had been translating into products for a long time, and had realised - before it was talked about so insistently - that the role of furniture companies is not so much to adapt to the behaviour of their customers, but to invent new ones and to introduce them already in the form of an answer, i.e. a product.
Starting from an infinite archive of furniture and accessories photographed in the iconic catalogues and preserved in the Ikea Museum - which Domus visited a few months ago - and also inspired by the rather spontaneous phenomenon of vintage re-selling, Ikea has recently decided to put some of the pieces that made it famous back into the “catalogue”.
They have watched them, tried them out, “adjusted” them to make them more suitable for the present. And those objects that have really aged well have returned to the market in various stages over the past few months. In the coming days, the Nytillverkad collection, which includes chairs, storage furniture, but also textiles and decorations, all made between the 1950s and 1980s, will be enriched with a further selection of pieces. See the Domus favourites in the gallery.
Which appeared in the 1985 catalogue under the name 'Guide'. The designer was Niels Gammelgaard, who created it in steel and chipboard, using the colours that have characterised 20th-century interiors since the middle of the last century.
It was one of the first products to be sold disassembled and was presented in '56 as "a small, charming object of ultra-modern design". It has never lost its freshness and its ability to adapt to different spaces without losing its personality.
Of course you know it, but not like this: Ikea's most famous product has been reborn with a design by Noboru Nakamura, who has lowered the height of the backrest to make the chair "more social" by encouraging communication. In addition to the classic and Aaltiana natural birch finish, a black and red version has been created.
She wanted to be inspired by cartoons and created a pattern reminiscent of popcorn. Anna Efverlund, a long-time Ikea designer, created a fabric that has become a bed linen set, but is also sold cut to size, leaving room for the creativity of the more imaginative.
Tell me you were born in the golden years of radical design. Completely covered in denim and launched in 1973, Vårkumla is whatever you want, use it however you want and put it wherever you want.