There is no mistaking the Ikea Museum. The room sets for each decade are arranged inside giant cardboard boxes. One glass cabinet is dedicated to a single meatball on a fork. Another displays a humble Allen key, giver of life to flat-pack furniture. The museum, housed on the site of the chain’s first store in Älmhult, in southern Sweden, is a celebration of everything Ikea. Even the original concrete floor, scuffed and scarred, proves Ikea’s work ethic, economy and longevity, according to our tour guide. All the furnishing heroes of the company’s 73-year history are here. There is a black leather Klippan sofa from 1984, just five years after the bestselling couch was launched – initially to a lukewarm response. There is a Poem chair from 1977, with its gracefully bent wooden arms – it would later become the much-loved Poäng – and the Bra wardrobe and those stalwarts of small storage solutions, the Moppe plywood boxes. There are surprises, too: the first room shows wooden armchairs from the few years between the company’s conception and its espousal of self-assembly.
With their robust refusal to pack flat, they seem like a chapter from a different story. In fact, the oldest exhibits have nothing to do with furniture, because Ingvar Kamprad, the store’s 90-year-old founder, started Ikea as a mail-order service for miscellaneous items: watches, cheap pens, plastic cigarette lighters and matches. There is even the old cigar box, in which Kamprad kept the money he made from selling fish he caught. “Everything he could earn a single penny on,” says the museum manager, Carina Kloek Malmsten, approvingly. It is her favourite exhibit. Ikea has undoubtedly contributed to the evolution of furniture design, not only by tapping into a classic Scandinavian ethos of clean line, and unity of form and function, all while maintaining low prices, but also in its search for cheaper and, in recent years, more sustainable materials. The Moment table, from the 1980s, for instance, has bent metal legs inspired by shopping trolleys. At a certain point in the exhibition, oak appears – a cheaper resource “discovered” in Poland after teak became too expensive.
Then came pine, particle board and the chunky layers of glued veneer that the company’s head of design, Marcus Engman, says he is currently trying to make much thinner. Not everything works, but the museum charts even the company’s failures with an air of pragmatism and pride. “Like every big company, we make big mistakes and we learn from them,” says Kloek Malmsten. “Once, we were trying to make furniture that only had air inside, so it was very good for flatpack: you filled it with air when you came home. But when you pumped it up, it leaked. There weren’t very many sold of that one. But then we changed it, and we had it instead in kids’ rooms, and they weren’t as heavy, so it worked.” Other mistakes, she says cryptically, are evident on the walls. One display board, entitled “My greatest fiasco”, briefly tells of Kamprad’s interest in fascism (he is thought to have joined the Swedish Nazi party at the age of 17). As museums go, Ikea’s is fairly introspective.
It’s a bit like being stuck inside any Ikea. There is just too much stuff from … More exploration of the brand’s interaction with the larger world of design would be welcome. Instead, the insularity can make the company appear Willy Wonka-ish. A corridor of multicoloured marvels of design, from doorknobs to hooks and chairs and fake grass, greets the visitor and, according to the museum’s creative manager, Cia Eriksson, represents “constantly being on the way”. One room set has been stuck to the ceiling, and the Billy bookcases that line the walls have been whitewashed, as have all the books inside them – hacked maybe? After all, even Engman, Ikea’s head of design, admits to hacking Ikea furniture. “Maybe changing a leg or two, some textiles,” he says. “Even if you’ve been part of a product development, at the end of the day, you didn’t like that textile on the sofa, then you change it.” Ikea’s headquarters are also here in the quiet town of Älmhult;
many of the 9,000 residents have a working connection to the chain. On campus, the blend of precision and sprawl is familiar from any of the company’s stores. Road signs specify distances to the metre – hotel 184m, gym 229m, but somehow places are still hard to find. Ikea’s newly launched bicycles are propped against lampposts. Not bicycles, but “transport systems”, according to Engman. There is even an Ikea bank. Ikea here is a kind of faith, a belief system. She “fell in love with Ikea” when her parents took her on a spree to the Malmö store for her 10th birthday. More than 30 years on, she can still list her haul that day: “Tura, a desk in white, a white bedframe with lots of cushions, curtains, a Billy bookcase …” When her dream came true and she joined the company in 1986, she bought two Klippan sofas, still going strong in her lounge, though she has changed their covers “at least 15 times”. The museum’s curator, Sofie Bergkvist, acquired her first pieces at around the same time.
She remembers a stool in the shape of a flower. It sounds as if, between them, they could almost assemble a museum from their own belongings. Actually, Eriksson says, it was pretty hard tracking down all the pieces. The Ikea archive held only 20% of the exhibits they wanted to include. Everything else had to be bought – a labour that took their colleague Thea Davidsson two-and-a- half years. When she started, fresh from working in an auction house, she didn’t know the names of any of the products. “I didn’t even know what Billy was.” The first thing she did was to “map” chairs, tables, lamps and so on, creating a folder of images for each one, of every article Ikea had ever made. Then she set about scouring eBay, Tradera (a Swedish auction site) and flea markets. The hardest items to find were a glass lamp designed by Tapio Wirkkala – eventually won on a UK auction site for around £300 – and rugs, such as the one beside the Klippan sofa in the 1980s room set.
“A boring carpet from the 80s,” Davidsson says with a shrug – you can tell she hasn’t worked for Ikea for long. She had to make the five-hour drive to Stockholm to tick that one off the list. Some items were still in their boxes, flatpacks intact. It’s bizarre to think of Ikea buying back its furniture and self-assembling them for posterity. But at least most finds came cheaply. When Davidsson used to work at an auction house, Ikea furniture and accessories never came up. “We didn’t even accept them.” But over the past year, that has begun to change. “Now I see Ikea things on auction sites all the time.” Sweden, she thinks, is learning to appreciate its design achievements. The museum has already received enquiries from tour guides in China, Germany, Holland and the US. Outside, they are extending the car park in readiness for the opening on 30 June and expanding the Ikea hotel to 256 rooms. The museum includes a giftshop and restaurant, so there will be meatballs aplenty to add to the 1bn sold worldwide.