Exclusive: IKEA brings souvenirs from Stockholm

STOCKHOLM, SOME MORE!

A curious medley of past, present and future, not for poetic reasons, but for ergonomic reasons, STOCKHOLM 2025 democratises the consumerist dream of being able to build a home that combines the wonder of techniques and the comfort of design at the same time. While the crafted home essentials and decoratives borrow cultural motifs from the past, IKEA’s always-innovating crew of designers and engineers refine it for the new-age homes with techniques that transcend trends and “last forever,” as the brand’s creative leader Karin Gustavsson tells me when I meet her on the wintry evening of the collection reveal inside a heritage building in Stockholm. Witnessing the collection myself that brimmed with prints, patterns, shapes, colours and materials — the outside world felt far away. With hopes to soon find this in India (the collection officially becomes available 10 April onwards).

FROM SWEDEN, FOR THE WORLD 

IKEA exhibited STOCKHOLM 2025 inside a heritage building (once the chamber of commerce) — furniture and decor accessories dotted across two floors, laid out as realistic rooms and corners of a home. Amidst stately ceilings and period paintings sat a cohort of IKEA’s rattan lounge chairs, inviting quiet repose; a shape-retaining statement sofa made without foam inserts; Murano-inspired glass tube chandeliers; flatwoven 100 per cent wool rugs in patterns reminiscent of nature, streets and Stockholm’s brick-red buildings. A wide view of the solid wood dining table sheathed with oak veneer in the next room murmured IKEA’s key concept of flatpacking (disassembled furniture that easily ships and travels distances). The dining chairs and table use wooden pegs, replacing the typical metal fittings and heavyduty tools. All you do is then, click the different parts of the furniture together by wedging the peg into the milled hole and voila! 

AN EXPERIMENTAL COMFORT

Our cultural awareness about the Scandinavian colour palette often begins and ends at beiges and browns. Breaking this stereotypical jinx, the new collection celebrates brighter colours, borrowed directly from Stockholm’s landscapes. Invited to an archipelago tour on the classic Waxholm boat, I cruise through historic landmarks like Gamla Stan and national museums, smaller islets, gigantic mountain rocks casually inlaid into streetside landscapes. And so the city’s colours naturally summon fascination and become one of the main characters of STOCKHOLM 2025. In the collection, one would notice impressions of symmetrical buildings blushing in brick reds and cosy yellows (popularly called Stockholm yellow), change of seasons like springtime greens, autumnal rustic hues, wintery greys and whites, and a mosaic of prints that teleport you to Scandinavian forest scapes. Can materiality be comforting?

The STOCKHOLM Sundhamn sofa in variant tones says so, crafted with natural materials like coconut fibre, cotton weave, Swedish pine and natural latex, developed by designers Ola Wihlborg and Nike Karlsson. “Nike and I began with sketching the sofa. I started with the sofa that I have at home (from the previous STOCKHOLM collection). It has a lot of cushion inside that needs to be fluffed up every day to make it look proper. Sofas often lose their shape. So, the idea was to create a piece that looks the same after every use,” sums up Wihlborg. Poetic as it is glamorous, the slender Bent Wood chair draped in red is a powerful symbol of wood’s natural flexibility and strength. During interviews, I am told, “It is a very old, handcrafted technique where solid beech is boiled, and each piece is carefully bent into arches and shaped by craftsmen. It is then held in a frame to cool and set,” informs Karlsson, who’s been with IKEA since 1992. Another expression of handcraft are the rugs, majorly made in India, in-house designer Paulin Machado tells me, who extensively works with textiles and related crafts. “We worked closely with master weavers in India, where each rug takes days to complete and blends multiple weaving methods into a single piece.” Having popularised the identity of minimally stylish, functional furniture in the northern region since the late 1940-50s, IKEA as a commercial phenomenon is embedded in Sweden’s cultural fabric. That is, how the Swedish aspire to live. And now the new collection embedded in Stockholm becomes a visual design dictionary for the world to pick from!