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.

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.