Not long ago, during an interview with the BBC, Kanye West announced, in his trademark third-person idiom, that he hoped to design for Ikea: “Yo, Ikea, allow Kanye to create, allow him to make this thing because you know what? I want a bed that he makes, I want a chair that he makes.” This seemed strange at first; what did West care about budget-friendly particleboard furniture? But if your goal is a kind of worldwide saturation, then collaborating with Ikea, with its 387 stores in 48 countries, is an ingenious tack. Ikea is one of the world’s largest consumers of lumber. It sells a set of its Billy bookcases every 10 seconds, and it’s said that one in 10 Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed. Last year, approximately 884 million people — more than twice the population of the U.S. — visited Ikea stores. There’s even a web series called “Hikea,” in which people take psychedelics and attempt to assemble, from a wordless instruction manual, the pile of planks and screws in front of them.
Ikea, not unlike West himself, is part of the zeitgeist. “To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialists or the enlightened amateur, to a privileged social class?” an interviewer once asked Charles Eames, who answered, “Design addresses itself to the need.” The reason Ikea furniture is so popular, one could argue, is that, with its combination of astonishingly low prices and streamlined Scandinavian design, it addresses the needs of almost everyone. Ikea does an enormous amount of research into these needs, sending employees, and sometimes even anthropologists, to study how people exist and interact with the objects in their homes. For the past three years, the company has published a “Life at Home” report, wherein they survey up to 12,000 people in 12 cities. Of course, Ikea is also a corporate behemoth that aims to turn a profit, but its appealing, affordable, flat-packed furniture and accessories really do make it possible to create a home for yourself when you are young, impecunious or without the time to scour thrift stores for castoff gems.
Though there’s a tacit but widely held belief that one eventually graduates from Ikea to “real” furniture, just as one moves on from tossing back Jell-O shots or hanging posters as art, design aficionados have long known that this isn’t necessarily true. A few low notes are thought to anchor a space, keeping it warm and realistic. Peppered among antiques and custom-made furniture, one routinely sees certain mass-market favorites. Restoration Hardware’s Chesterfield-style sofa, or West Elm’s Parsons table, or a handful of usual suspects from Ikea: those pleasingly plain kitchen cabinets; that Malm bed, whose austere low-slung minimalism conjures the ghost of Donald Judd. (There’s a quiz: “Donald Judd, or cheap furniture?”) The majority of the pieces are so innocuous, so elemental, that they blend easily with everything else in a room. Only the design literate will notice the difference. And who cares if they do? Conspicuous consumption, like that dreadful word “luxury,” feels dated: as ’80s as Nan Kempner and leveraged buyouts, as ’90s as the Miller sisters and tiny Prada backpacks.
Ikea furnishings are part of our everyday lives, as ubiquitous as air, and just as invisible. But if the brand has been snagging your attention lately, popping up in high-end magazine spreads, on design websites (“4 Ikea Designers You Should be Following on Instagram”) and in Kanye West interviews, it’s thanks to one man, the company’s head of design, Marcus Engman. Hired in 2012, Engman is fulfilling an ambitious mandate, to elevate Ikea’s design without raising prices. Since 1995, the company has released a special “PS” collection every few years: These are the chicer-than-usual pieces that those with a great eye seem to have a knack for alighting on — the aesthetically original, higher-end things you can’t quite believe are Ikea, like David Wahl’s “exploding” pendant lamp, whose panels expand with the pull of a drawstring; or the plant tables unveiled at Milan’s Salone del Mobile in 2012, with holes for potted greenery. Each PS collection has been animated by an idea: updating designs from the Ikea archives to suit today’s smaller spaces, say, or creating mobile, multifunctional furniture for an urban, itinerant, apartment-renting crowd.
Since late 2013, Engman has doubled down on this effort, quietly but steadily putting out a spate of limited-edition “Vitality” collections: “We’re raising the bar and the speed,” he says. There have been 17 of these collections available in the U.S. so far, with more to come this fall and next spring, and plans to produce at least 10 a year. Many involve partnerships with well-known designers and artists — Ilse Crawford, Katie Eary, Ingegerd Raman — but Engman is quick to emphasize that Ikea is not merely slapping an illustrious name on an inferior product, or making shoddy versions of a designer’s signature pieces. These collections are actual collaborations, intended to investigate a particular concept or technique. For Crawford, the British designer whose gorgeous, subtle Sinnerlig collection came out in late 2015, it was how to preserve the rawness and tactility of natural materials, like cork and seagrass, when making mass-produced furniture. It was also designing for a home that has become more fluid.
People work in the living room, eat in the bathroom (really), so Crawford created pieces with multiple uses, like a dining room table with a hidden sling where you can stash your work papers out of sight. The British designer Tom Dixon, whose Ikea collection launches next fall, sought to upend the staid conventions of upholstery by constructing a sofa with an aluminum frame (“taken a bit from the car industry,” Dixon told me) that can be customized with various modular parts, and thus formalizes the informal practice of “hacking” Ikea furniture. The Danish design company Hay, whose collection also debuts in 2017, is reimagining a series of “new modern basics,” Engman says — furniture, lighting, textiles and accessories in a subdued palette of gray, green and white, including a wooden table, bench seating and a tasteful woven update on the infamous blue and yellow Frakta bag. “As a designer, it is compelling to have the opportunity to reach so many people,” Ilse Crawford says.
“The whole design industry put together produces a fraction of what Ikea does. The collaboration enabled us to understand where we could push the boundaries, to see where improvements could be made within the production process to achieve a more human result.” The corporate literature accompanying the Vitality collections makes a point of noting that these are pieces that will “age well over time” or “stand the test of time” or be “pass[ed] ... onto the next generation.” If Ikea can somehow manage to offer inexpensive furniture we are also dying to keep, that would be truly novel. But part of the company’s appeal — and a driving factor in its popularity — is that its products feel to some degree disposable, or at least ephemeral, offering us all the freedom and mobility that goes with that. Even when Ikea furniture is beautifully designed, we are not tethered to it, as we are with family heirlooms or things so pricey we can’t bear to get rid of them. We don’t have to repair, insure or maintain it.