New collection puts icons from Ikea's history back on the shelves

Padiglione Visconti, Via Tortona 58, Milano
April 17-23 2023, h. 14-00 (April 17 h. 14-16) 

Lövet is a small, three-legged side table with a lacquered surface that echoes the shape of an elongated leaf. It is already almost seventy years old – it was launched by Ikea in 1956, when the brand didn’t even have a store yet but sold its items by mail. The side table had already made it back into the catalog with the name Lövbacken, rigorously with the original colors, in 2013 first and then two years ago. Today, the side table welcomes bright and original colors, like orange, blue, or light green, and it becomes one of the Ikea key pieces for the celebration of its eightieth anniversary at the Milan Design Week. The Nytillverkad collection includes solely pieces taken from the “treasure chest” the Ikea archive is and redesigned for the present, employing new manufacturing technologies and paying the utmost attention on the hot themes of sustainability and recycling. And, obviously, of prices.

“Vintage and second-hand Ikea items are in high demand,” explains Johan Ejdemo, Design Manager at Ikea Sweden. Items that often reach sky-high prices compared to their launch prices. Among the reasons, according to the designer, there is the nostalgia effect but also the higher playfulness of the pieces designed in the 1970s and 1980s, which we appeal to in order to find an optimism that, among wars and the climate crisis, seems further and further away. Ikea’s move with Nytillverkad is to reintegrate the spirit of the present, putting back on the shelf these designs keeping the same, or even lower, price of when they were launched. To make all of this possible, Ejdemo explains that it was necessary to undergo a significative and massive redesigning that connected different time periods.

The desire to bring old products back to the shelves and to the market had to deal with the new regulations and new difficulties that emerged from the evolution of the manufacturing processes as well as the necessity of updating the employed materials, making both structural improvements and relevant decisions (for instance, replacing animal leather with vegan leather). For Ejdemo, “it was a tough job,” but a righteous effort. He confesses to Domus he is curious about how the new Nytillverkad pieces will be received by the new generations, which the collection’s target for two reasons: for “the awareness on sustainability that brings young people to buying at markets,” but also for “this renewed interest in furniture, a type of interest we haven’t seen for years.”

“When digging into our design archive, I found so much to choose from, it’s a true treasure trove,” explains Karin Gustavsson, Range Identity Leader, Ikea Sweden. When working on Nytillverkad, he recovered figures of the brand’s identity that were lost along the way and as well as people that made Ikea’s history. For example, this is what happened with Noburu Nakamura, a designer born in 1938 and the first Japanese designer to work for Ikea, who designed a 1970s well-known leather and beech wood chair, among other things (today on the second-hand market at about 700 euros). “Many of these designers are over 80 years old today.” Like Sven Fristedt, one of the most famous Swedish textile designers, who between 1960s and 1980s collaborated with Ikea, designing patterns that have been reused in the Nytillverkad fabrics and surfaces.

“Colorful, fun, and direct,” this is how Gustavsson defines the new collection. It is perfect to integrate your house decor with elements that transcend time, like the Domstein stool, which echoes the Jerry stool by Karin Mobring, with pine seat and metal legs, or the Smed coat stand developed by Rutger Andersson (the original is at 200 euros on the second-hand market). All these items were selected after taking a careful look in the archive, after which there was a long discussion with the team of Ikea engineers, in order to understand what could be relaunched today, keeping in mind that, as Gustavsson stresses, Ikea intends to “close the loop” in terms of circularity and sustainability within 2030. The Billy bookcase, which has been accompanying Ikea for at least half of its history, is at the same time the anti-Nytillverkad and its ideal prototype: the symbol item of the Swedish brand that also became the name of a Bloomberg’s index – it counts about one Billy sold every 100 people on the planet. Yet, the 2023 Billy is radically different from a 1990s Billy and even from the one Gillis Lundgren sketched on a napkin, explains Fredrika Inger, Managing Director di IKEA Sweden. Because Ikea objects are always the embodiment of the time in which they are made.

We are comfortably sitting on a Klippan sofa under a gigantic hex wrench, the usually under-celebrated symbol of Ikea, in a corner of the “Assembling the Future Together” exhibition, which represents the brand here at the 2023 Design Week in the wide spaces of the Padiglione Visconti in Via Tortona. Among the installations dedicated to the four elements, a milk-colored Billy pops up like a white monolith on the set-up dedicated to the earth element – which, very prosaically, consists of a mound of earth. Inger discusses in detail how Billy was adapted to our times, with a recent evolution that eliminates all plastic parts and makes the assembling and disassembling process easier, and therefore more durable – do you recall that Ikea furniture cannot be taken apart once they have been put together, otherwise, they get ruined? “We built it in a way that is perfectly circular,” says Inger. “I can’t say we are already completely circular, but we are working on it, that’s our objective.” An objective that comes from both Ikea’s identity and the nice display dedicated to the iconic pieces of the brand, that puts the historical pieces on the shelves – tables, cupboards, lights, chairs – and portrays the evolution of the Swedish brand’s design language throughout the decades. A language that today must incorporate the emergences dictated by the climate crisis. This is today’s great challenge that emerges from Inger’s words. 

The Managing Director traces the trajectory of Ikea’s strategy, starting from the achievements of a design that has always had the goal of being democratic and accessible, and that found a solution to the debate on the dominance between shape and function “deciding that the most important thing is, simply, the price.” Then she introduces the present-future perspective, which was delineated in the exhibition through the four elements: from now on we need to be good and organized when using the resources that our planet has to offer and when using our creativity and technology to optimize water, for example – see the project on the 50-liter house – air – whose quality is essential – or energy, trying to save as much as possible, like Ikea has showed in the recent collaboration with Little Sun. These are all design emergencies that Ikea took the responsibility of bringing into the Salone’s discourse. “And so I think that role of Ikea here at the Fuorisalone, and more generally of whoever works in the design field, is that of great responsibility, because it’s about making things better for both the planet and the people,” concludes Inger.

All images courtesy Ikea