#70s car brochures

[atomic-chronoscaph]

General Motors 1973 Motorhome

[stone-cold-groove]

That’s right, we talking four hundred and forty-five cubic inches of style, baby!

[beef-brisket]

Devil and the Priest!au

(Feel free to change the name- it's 1am where I am, so my brain is starting to fry lol)

@things-arent-what-they-seem66 @fanofstuff01

---

Lucifer drove through the country side, he's been behind the wheel for nearly 5 hours. He didn't realize how much of a drive getting to this monastery. He knew it was remote but this is getting ridiculous- he should have brought snacks.

He glanced out his window every now and then to take in the scenery. He's currently driving past a large body of water, where he spotted a small island. He wishes he was over there, with no worries or expectations. With no one but himself. The Vatican has been on his ass lately about making this trip. Apparently, there was something 'dark- and 'unsettling' at this monastery. If any of the priests he knew were anything to go by, it was probably just them. He swore they refused to die, they had more wrinkles than brain cells.

Lucifer turned his radio up, some type of rock song was one, it was a big no no to be listening to music like this, it's his car. Driver picks the music, and the Vatican shuts their cake hole.

Finally, as the sun was setting, Lucifer arrived at the monastery. The large stone building loomed over him, maybe the Vatican was right, this place was unsettling. He felt like he was being watched, the multiple colours in the sky masking how decrepit this place actually is. Pulling out a brochure from his pocket, Lucifer couldn't help but smirk, they're really trying to market this place like it's a holiday retreat.

Lucifer: "Welcome to the Hazbin. Find not only sanctuary and enlightenment but also beaches and the best crab around!" ...right, definitely staying away from the crab then...

After an exhausted sign, Lucifer licked his car and picked up his bags. Making his way towards the large wooden doors, Lucifer couldn't help but dread the next two or three hours, all he wanted was to hop into bed and close the world off foe a few hours but he'd probably have to take the whole tour and- ew- meeting people.

He shuddered at the thought.

Lucifer: I wonder if I could convince them to leave the formalities till tomorrow...

Lucifer gripped a huge, iron door knocker and banged it three times. He knew this could take a while so he prepared to get comfortable- until the door was pulled open.

Priest: Hello! And welcome to the Hazbin! How can I assist you this fine evening!

Lucifer: uh- yeah- hi, my name Luicfer, I've been told to come here by the Vatican- I've been told you're expecting me...?

Priest: hm... Lucifer...

The man flicked through a small book, humming every so often. What's the point in having glasses if you still can't read a damn book.

Lucifer: look man- sir- it's been a long drive, I'd really like to just get to sleep-

Priest: ah! Yes! Here you are, Lucifer! Please, come right in! We've been expecting you for hours, your overseer said you would be here this morning- but better late than never I suppose!

The man moved aside to let Lucifer in. He really didn't like this guy, but that's not new, priest are pretty... eccentric.

The man shit the door behind him, using at least six locks to secure it.

Priest: pardon my manners, Lucifer! My name is Alastor- Father Alastor. And I'll be your superior while you're here

Ah, great. He has to answer to this... lovely man. Forcing a smile, Lucifer did what he did best: lie.

Lucifer: that's very exciting Father Alastor, look forward to working with you and getting to know this place more personally!

Alastor: oh, I could imagine! I'm sure you've heard a lot about me! I've been in charge of five other monasteries before this one! All saw a raise in volunteers and profits.

Lucifer: that's fantastic, Father. It's a real honor to be working on this project with you-

Alastor: "project", yes, that's one word to describe it.

Alastor lead Lucifer down a long hall, hebcouldbt believe how quiet it was. He was told there were at least 60-70 nuns and other workers here but it just seemed abandoned.

Thankfully, Alastor showed Lucifer to his room, it was large with a queen bed in the middle. It didn't have much furniture, just a set of draws and a desk out looking the garden. It was dead and overgrown, but the air was fresh, he'll have to start taking up writing again.

Alastor: well! Lucifer, it is a real pleasure to have you here! Tomorrow I'll show you around and I introduce you to some of the other occupants here- there are quite a few so I do expect you to introduce yourself to some of them in your own time.

Lucifer dumped his bags on his bed, and turned to face Alastor.

Lucifer: that understandable. Thank you for this Alastor, I'll see you in the morning-

Alastor: bright and early Mr Lucifer. I like to get the day started as the break of dawn

Of course he does.

Lucifer: great! I better get some sleep then

Alastor: yes, you should. Goodnight Lucifer

Finally, Lucifer was alone. Or at least he hoped. He still hasn't shaking that feeling from earlier. Except this time, he was certain nothing was watching him, Alastor seemed to be the only other living thing here. And that's giving the bastard a lot of credit. Not once did he stop smiling- Lucifer already wants to wipe that look off his face.

All Lucifer wanted to do was sleep, so he got comfortable and started to drift off.

[hirocimacruiser]

Honda Civic brochure pages.

CIVIC

The Super Civic was a new trend car with economy and dynamic performance suited to the 1980s.

1300 S

1500 SC

It perfectly combines the best fuel economy in the 1500cc class with powerful driving performance.

Resource and energy conservation are common themes around the world. The new CIVIC is available with a new engine system that takes advantage of the excellent combustion efficiency of the lean burn method, which is the greatest advantage of the CVCC engine. It offers not only excellent fuel economy, but also low maintenance costs and a low price.

10 mode driving, Ministry of Transport inspection value

1500CE model E-SR 18 km/l

60km/h constant speed test value

28km/l 1500CE, GF (5 door) Model E/SR, Model E-ST

And yet, it still has the powerful driving feel of a sports car. It's truly a Super Civic.

For example, the new cliff-cut panel in front of the passenger seat provides enough space that there is no need to push the seat back.

An aerodynamic body that provides a smooth ride.

The styling minimizes air resistance and is focused on practical aerodynamics. It is agile in urban areas and stable and smooth on the highway. The new suspension grips the road firmly.

The springs of the front and rear suspensions have been offset to provide a more comfortable ride. The rear also uses a new Honda-style strut system, a world first, to ensure sufficient compliance. The suspension is much tighter.

1300・5-door LX

A new instrument panel.

The functions necessary for driving are concentrated around the driver. The centralized target meter () that places the speedometer and tachometer in one view, as well as the newly designed rotary channel radio, are also standard equipment. The design is easy to see and use.

A large, international-sized interior designed for the world.

Compared to conventional 5-door vehicles, the interior length is 25 mm longer and the interior width is 35 mm wider. Furthermore, the clever use of each space has resulted in an amazingly efficient interior.

All models are fully open hatchbacks.

It is a big opening that opens to the full width of the body from a low position, that is, just above the bumper. Moreover, the interior floor is low and flat. Large and wide objects can be easily loaded. The three-stage variable rear seat is extremely practical. It is a design that prioritizes ease of use.

1500 3door CX

Wild ride. CX

1500 3door CE

CIVIC

1500 5door CF

1300・3-door SE Model E-SL Engine model EJ ●CVCC・1,335cm2・Water-cooled inline 4-cylinder horizontally mounted OHC-68 horsepower ●Fuel economy 22km/ℓ(60km/h・flat road test value)●Front-wheel drive●Overall length 3,760mmOverall width 1,580mm ●Strut-type four-wheel independent suspension●Front-wheel disc brakes ●4-speed

1500, 3-door CE, Model E-SR, Engine model EM CVCC-1.488cm2, water-cooled in-line 4-cylinder, horizontally mounted, OHC-80 horsepower, Fuel economy 28km/ℓ (60km/h, constant speed test value), 18km/ℓ (10 mode running, Ministry of Transport review value), Front-wheel drive, Overall length 3,760mm, Overall width 1,580mm, Strut-type four-wheel independent suspension, Front wheels, Disc brakes with servo, 5-row

*1500-3 door SE is made to order.

If you're looking for a Civic, visit your local Honda dealer.

CIVIC VAN

Gentle on luggage and gentle on people. The capable Civic Van is born.

The luggage compartment is 1,520mm long (with two occupants), 1,270mm wide at its widest point, and 805mm high, making it spacious and easy to handle. Highly refined quality. Powerful and robust dynamic performance. Extremely quiet and safe, this is the birth of a reliable business car that pursues a high level of harmony between passengers and business.

1300-5 door SV, LV model J-VC Engine model EN 1,335cm * Water-cooled inline 4-cylinder horizontal OHC, 70 horsepower ● Fuel economy 18.5km/(60km/h, constant speed test value) ● Front wheel drive ● Overall length 3,995mm, overall width 1,580m, overall height 1,385mm ● Front wheel servo disc brakes ● 4-speed

[merpmonde]

"Stick an aircraft engine in it" part 1 - Boeing Jetfoil

In the late 60s and early 70s, all branches of transport were hoping for an increase in performance similar to what the jet airliner brought to aviation, and the solution was invariably to use similar gas turbine technology, with invariably identical career trajectories when the oil crises hit, as, apart from in aviation, far more economical engine options were available. So I was very surprised to see this still active in Japan last summer:

This is a hydrofoil which uses gas turbines to power a pump-jet. Once it is going fast enough, it takes off and runs on foils, greatly reducing water resistance and achieving speeds up to 45 knots, over 80 km/h (which, on water, is very fast). I remember seeing exactly this type of vessel in ferry brochures when I was a child; Oostende Lines operated some between England and Belgium. The advent of the SeaCat, a class of huge Diesel-powered car-carrying catamarans, got the better of the hydrofoils and the hovercraft, which was incidentally another case of "stick an aircraft engine in it".

This specific class of hydrofoil takes the mantra to another level, as it was designed by Boeing, which named it the 929 Jetfoil. Production was licensed to Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan, which made boats for the domestic market. The Rainbow Jet is one of these, running between Sakaiminato on the San'in coast and the Oki Islands. I saw more of them at Atami in Eastern Shizuoka, providing transport to the Izu Islands. So, despite the astronomical 2150 L/h consumption (though to be fair, I can't find consumption numbers for equivalent foot passenger-only catamarans), Japan still runs them...

[tameblog]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[ramestoryworld]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[alexha2210]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[angusstory]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[tumibaba]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[romaleen]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[monaleen101]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[iamownerofme]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[shelyold]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link

[hirocimacruiser]

Tommykaira m08 brochure.

Small Magical Box

A small, small "magic box"

Tommy Kaira transformed GM's worldwide compact car "Matiz" designed by Giugiaro into a sports car!

The cute exterior, sensual exhaust note, engine that is fun to rev, and exquisite suspension tune are just the ``magic boxes'' that will put a smile on your face!

Just like the ``Tommykaira M13'' based on the Nissan March, the Matiz is equipped with a traditional engine tune and a suspension called Tommykaira Magic, making it a truly tiny micro-sport! The 800cc engine never generates large horsepower. The M08 is not a fast car because it maintains its rotation. However, once you learn how to drive this M08, you'll learn that horsepower has nothing to do with sports cars!

Now, let's go to "Small World" with m08!

PIC CAPTION

The photo is a development vehicle and is equipped with a front diffuser, but it is not included in the actual product.

Also, details may differ from the actual product.

Tommy Kaira Magic by a skilled mechanic!

In order to make Matiz 800cc engine, which is by no means powerful, as fun as a sports car, the tuning chosen by Tommy Kaira is the standard NA tune, which includes traditional engine head surface grinding and port polishing.

However, the rev limiter has been tuned to make the most of the many years of know-how that has been used to create cars.

The engine that revs up without stress is truly the genealogy of the Tommykaira complete car!

A small displacement engine such as 800cc may feel like it lacks torque at low speeds, but the feeling of power that jumps up from around 4000 rpm is thrilling!

In addition, the specially designed suspension kit has a stiff setting, but has an exquisite setting that suppresses the feeling of thrusting and generates just the right amount of roll while maintaining stickiness.

Additionally, the specially developed exhaust muffler and Tommykaira original intake system not only improve efficiency, but also provide a pleasant sound to the driver, with a sensual sound quality.

Yes, as you can see from this tuning content, the "Tommykaira M08" is truly a sports car!

The city where you usually drive is the circuit!

The specs for the Tommykaira m08 are only 70 horsepower.

In this day and age where manufacturers are releasing cars with large displacement engines and over 300 horsepower, it's natural to think that they are too weak.

However, how many places and drivers can use all that power to drive?

Even if you only have 70 horsepower, if you can make full use of it, you'll never be inferior to a car with that much power!

Due to the engine characteristics of the ``Tommykaira M08,'' it is necessary to maintain high rotation speed while driving.

You can drive by turning, downshifting, and turning corners... Because there is no horsepower, you can enjoy the fun of driving on a circuit, even in the city, while staying within the legal speed limit!

Let's run around the city in a small "magic box" in search of a real smile!

m08

Tommykaira m08 Tuned Matiz

Exterior that emphasizes the cuteness of the base car

The design of the ``Matisse'', which is the base car for the ``Tommykaira M08'', is by Giugiaro. Its cute exterior design is unlike any other, and is full of originality that can show off the individuality of the rider.

Tommykaira has transformed its exterior with the traditional center stripe and side diffuser to further emphasize its presence!

Its adorable exterior looks more like a pet than a car. "Tommykaira m08" is your own car, different from others!

SPECIFICATIONS

Max Output 70ps/6200rpm

Max Torque 9.5kgm/3500rpm

mechanism

Cylinder head surface grinding

port polishing

Tappet clearance adjustment

Gasket set

Tommykaira original intake system (air cleaner & heat shield)

Rear piece muffler (SUS304, TIG welding)

Dedicated iridium spark plug

plug cord

Tappet cover paint (red)

Tommykaira serial plate

Actual running setting

suspension

Sports coil spring (front/rear)

tommykaira original shock absorber

exterior

mascot emblem

m08 emblem sticker

tommykaira emblem sticker

side diffuser

center stripe

Special aluminum wheels (5.0J×14+44)

BRIDGESTONE POTENZA GIII (165/55R14)

Carbon style mirror/rear door garnish

interior

Instrument cluster trim panel kit (black or red carbon style)

Steering & shift knob leather processing

Recaro seat (driver's seat)

SR with dedicated rail red or blue

Recaro seat (navigator's seat)

SR with dedicated rail red or blue

tachometer

Equipment varies depending on grade

Please refer to the attached price list for details.

Tommy Kaira

Tomita Yume Sales Co., Ltd.

Challenging Dream

8, Kisshoin Mukoda-cho, Minami-ku, Kyoto 601-8307

TEL 075 (326) 3233/FAX 075 (316) 3588

E-mail: info@tommykaira.com

Web site:http://www.tommykaira.com/

[iammeandmy]

Your earliest familiarity with Ikea may vary, but mine was reading the catalog at my best friend’s house around age 10. I was always impressed with the cool stuff her family had, and when I found out you could order it from a catalog, and not just get it from a store (or pick it off the street, which is how my family found much of our furniture in New York City), the intrigue only continued. I’ll always remember the day I got my treasured first item from the brand—a mosquito netting canopy for my bed, the ultimate in cool for a middle schooler.It wasn’t until I went to college that I got to fully avail myself of its offerings. Driving to the Chicago suburbs to pick out a coffee table and a desk for my new apartment felt like true adulthood, despite the fact that the car we drove to get there didn’t have power steering, a radio, or air-conditioning. This is the association that might stick in the minds of many Americans when they think of Ikea—the first time you’re able to buy furniture of your own, and it better be cheap, but it’d be nice if it was chic.This solution they’d created for their audience—being able to buy design-y furniture at an affordable price—was once a problem for Ikea. What would they do when their demographic aged out of their wares? That’s why their Stockholm collection was born in the ’80s, featuring leather sofas and chairs, glass-fronted cabinets, and Nordic birch wooden furniture with hidden fittings. "What could the company offer all those people who had grown out of their low pine sofa, taken down their pop and protest posters, and moved their Ivar shelves into the garage?" the website explains, of the collection’s history. "They were looking for comfort and elegance, and [founder] Ingvar Kamprad came up with the solution: a ‘best of Ikea collection’."The company did, and still does, pride itself on the "democratization" of design. "The most beautiful Swedish furniture had long been reserved for a few: the rich," a 1985 Ikea brochure reads. "Ordinary folk had to make do with poor copies or nothing at all. This doesn’t sit right with us."Since then, Stockholm has been released in seven editions, with the goal of providing "modern Scandinavian design of the highest quality, offered at an affordable price." And in February, in an experience that would have awed college student-me, I went to, yes, the city of Stockholm to preview the company’s eighth for its 40th anniversary. The new collection—available to shop Thursday April 10th—is 96 pieces, and was inspired by both the Swedish capital and the immense nature just outside of it. It’s comprised of rich, deep colors with pops of surprising neons, sturdy woods, velvets, leathers, and smooth edges—a fit for the continued ’70s moment we find ourselves in.During my interviews, I was particularly interested in learning from the designers about how they tailor Ikea’s ethos of price-first—they all start with a price band, and design a piece to match that—to create a higher-end product. In a collection like this, they have the opportunity to use more complex building techniques and more expensive materials, but the design ethos that is used in the least expensive items still informs all their products. (One thing they shared that they don’t have: a master database of all their materials and techniques, because it’s all learned, shared, institutional knowledge.) Because of the company’s scale, they are still able to produce items for low costs that would typically be challenging elsewhere, like the handblown glass vases in this collection, which, when produced at volume, become feasible. Here, in their own words, this year’s Stockholm collection designers describe what they were trying to accomplish in creating five of the collection’s pieces for the masses, ones that manage to feel personal to you.These interviews have been edited for length and clarity, and all prices have been converted into USD.Available in dark turquoise, dark brown, beige and gray/white, this sofa can be configured into many sizes depending on which sections you purchase. Below it is a handwoven, 100 percent wool rug.Stockholm 2025 SofaOla­ Wihlborg, designer: We can start with the sofa, because the whole collection started with sofas. Because we wanted to find something that sets the tone and that’s also the piece that sets the tone in the living room. It’s a big piece.So we started the sketch of the sofa—it was [fellow designer] Nike [Karlsson] and I—and the starting point for me was my sofa at home. I have a sofa from a previous Stockholm collection with a lot of cushion inside. We always fluff these cushions and make them in order for the night. And now we have a lot of kids and we have a dog and the cushions are all over the place. So the idea was to do a new sofa that looks the same all the time.It’s quite tricky to find a shape and a material that also has comfort. It’s easy, it turns out, to be something that is just hard. So I started to find these soft shapes and I sketched the shape in soft materials also. We’ve done the shape in Älmhult [Ikea’s headquarters] in the pattern shop, and when we finalized the shape and we were satisfied, we sent the shapes to the supplier where we made a lot of samples to try out the right comfort.We have a spring core with the springs inside the center, and then we cover it with a cold molded foam shape. That makes it also very durable. The cold molded foam will keep up the quality over a very long time. You can use the modules separately also, so you do not need to connect them. You can have them like an armchair also.Karin Gustavsson, creative leader: We knew from the beginning we wanted a velvet.Wihlborg: We started with velvet because we wanted the soft feeling.Gustavsson: The colors pop much more in the velvet. And then the velvet is, I think it’s like 90 percent recycled polypropylene. And it’s a really good quality, high-quality velvet. We have a full textile team who develops the fabrics for us and they are so tested—they need to last a long time. And also not to be too much for dust. It’s antistatic. And the blue one came because we said we need a pop color—we need something to pop.Everyone thought it was crazy. And then we did a brown one and everyone said, "Brown? Gray and black." Because I love brown. And now it’s so trendy. And then we made the beige ones. Everyone’s so grayish otherwise. Wihlborg: The cover is removable so you can wash it. And the bouclé came up when we made the armchair. For that one, it’s more tricky to find the fabric that we can cover this shape with. And that’s why we started with the bouclé and then when we saw the armchair, we said we need to have the same on the sofa.Gustavsson: It’s so Scandinavian, it’s a little bit like this snow feeling. And it’s not too bouclé—it’s quite a dry fabric.Wihlborg: We always have the price in mind when we start, not the exact price [but a range]. When you have that, you can see immediately, oh, we can’t go too big, we can’t go with that material. And you have a certain amount of money to spend. Of course sometimes you need to step out from that. But then you also have to explain why.Gustavsson: We knew that Nike’s sofa was going to be, for us, a bit expensive. It’s $1,899.Wihlborg: It’s more expensive than this one.Gustavsson: We thought, for us, it was a bit expensive. And here you start at $1,299.Wihlborg: For two.Gustavsson: So you could say you get this one for $1,299 and then you add a mid-seat for $400. So it’s a quite good price for this one. Even to make a four seater, which you often cannot afford. The thing is also with this one, in a normal flat in London or Tokyo, you cannot bring a big sofa into the house because of the elevators. And you’re on the 12th floor, you cannot have someone carry [it up]. This one you can easily take piece by piece in the elevator. It’s also convenient for moving. We even did home visits just to see.The other sofa in the collection is made of cotton/linen, leather and solid pine.Stockholm 2025 SofaNike Karlsson, designer: This sofa was really hard to make because I had so many different directions, but we ended up designing what we wanted to have. Then we met the supplier and we started to discuss: How should we build up the construction? How should we build the comfort? I said that maybe when we do this high-end product, could we also maybe try to reduce the amount of foam? Because foam is hard to recycle. And then the supplier came up with the idea of coconut fiber. They had it in other products—not for Ikea—but I thought it was something that we had in the ’50s or something that didn’t exist anymore. So that is what we have on the armrest, in between the frame and the fabric, is coconut fiber. And then in the seat portion we have this pocket spring. And then on top of that, they have, instead of foam, latex [from trees]. And that is super durable. When it comes to sit on it, it keeps the shape. So now we can offer this sofa with a 25-year warranty, because it is so durable.The fabric, that was the trickiest one, because I was so worried that we couldn’t develop a new fabric for this sofa in the quality that I really wanted to have.Paulin Machado, designer: You’re picky. Karlsson: It’s so important what kind of fabric you can offer on the sofa. And then we also worked with the small pillows, how to make comfort without bird feather down or something like that. That is so nice. But you can’t do that, because of the animals and also people are allergic. These cushions are built in three layers. We have this block in the center with latex. And then we have fiber on that. And then we started to get a really nice feeling when you touch it, but it still, there was something wrong, because it didn’t sound right. So then they asked, ‘What is it that sounds on a feather pillow?’ It’s the cotton fabric that you have that is woven really, really tight. The pen crunch, it’s the crunch [of the feathers]. Could we add that fabric to get the right noise?The glass pendant lamp comes in two different styles, one horizontal, the other more vertical.Stockholm 2025 Pendant lampGustavsson: [Nike is] a carpenter. He lives on this remote island. He’s very stubborn. I said, "Nike, you need to do the lighting project." He was like, "I’m not doing this one. I’m not doing crystal chandeliers." I said, "You have to." And then he came back with wooden lamps. I don’t want wood!He’s so stubborn. And then suddenly he realized, maybe you should try. And then he tried, and he came with his solution and he worked with the product developer from our team. And he came up with all these tubes, this engineering solution, how to get these two rings. You put them on yourself, that’s a little silicon ring inside and you get these cotton gloves in the box. It’s amazing. Doesn’t weigh anything. It is $149.For me, it was so Swedish, this crystal chandelier. You can see from the old days, there were these big ones. I thought it was time for the ’70s look, vintage. We would see them in every hotel or small cafes.Wihlborg: The knockdown solution was in from the beginning. He had the idea of the tubes that hang on the frame and make it flat pack from the beginning. So we always need to have that. The last step, the knockdown, you need to start with the knockdown.The linen-covered lamp also comes in a warm yellow. It’s set on top a new acrylic painted cabinet.Stockholm 2025 Table lampMachado: With light you start very quickly with function. What do you want the light to look like? Where is this going to be placed? What type of atmosphere would it give to a certain room? Because of course it’s highly functional, if it’s like a reading lamp or something else. So we knew we wanted to do a more atmospheric light and something a little bit smaller that you can place easily anywhere. And I’m a textile designer, so that’s how I initially think—through textiles—no matter what I do. I really wanted to have a nice quality. And then of course when you put a pattern or a color like this, the light output would look very different. But I think it still has a very rich and cozy atmosphere to it. And we also know that it’s not a piece that can cost awfully much because it’s a smaller piece and we need to be affordable there. So this is also of course a collaboration, but smart engineering. It all comes in a very small packed way where you stretch the textile through the little metal wires. It looks like a bigger piece and then it comes in a very small nicely packed piece.That pattern itself comes from my own nature walks. And we started this collection in the autumn, so it was like early fall. I take a lot of pictures when I’m out also and I zoom in and I zoom out. And then I really got inspired by what I had close to myself, which is picking mushrooms and beautiful little mosses and that type of mini world.I just dove in and I started sketching by hand and then slowly it evolved into something more, into a print or a texture. [Other designers get involved] very early. And that’s painful sometimes, especially when, you see, it was time-tedious to do it. This black-and-white color [the other colorway the pattern comes in] I was not particularly fond of in the beginning. I revisited it many times and built on it. We also have a big prototype shop in our studio and even if I do paintings by hand, yes I can show that, but then when I make it on the computer, of course I can also scale it up or put it down and I can print it out and we put it up. But you have instant feedback like that.[I thought] I would love to put it on linen, which we have. We have 100 percent linen and also for the cushions, it’s 100 percent. Because there’s few other qualities where you get that dryness, and it’s just so nice I think.The table is made of clear acrylic lacquered solid wood with an oak veneer, and is surrounded by chairs of the same—plus a leather seat cushion.Stockholm 2025 TableKarlsson: That construction is super old at Ikea. I think it comes from the ’50s, I think it was door makers. You can create something that is very form-stable. You can make something that is really light. It’s like making beams for house construction. You need the top and the bottom and that thing between doesn’t need to keep the distance in between the two surfaces. For decades we called it bored frame, bored styles. We have different kinds of techniques to do that. So it’s so natural for us to use. We don’t think about it.Johan Ejdemo, global design manager: It’s also just a way of not being wasteful with resources and not doing thick boards without adding so much weight to it. You can transport things easily also. If you’re building a long table like that and you don’t want to have an underframe, then this technique comes in very, very handy to create this stable construction. All the four legs should kind of hit the floor at the same level. And so you need that stability. What’s a little bit special with this one is obviously the shape. We normally don’t do that soft kind of shape for a frame, it’s quite a production process. So that is adding a next level of detail to that.Wihlborg: I started with a long table because that one has the special shape of rounded ends. I have explored that shape in my home, because it’s really good for facing more than one on the side. Instead of just doing a complete round, you have a longer round. It works really good for two people on the sides. And then I also wanted to have a super stable tabletop so you can avoid this underframe. All the construction of the strength is inside the tabletop, so you can sit with your legs up to the tabletop.Gustavsson: It’s so heavy as well.Wihlborg: I have made similar tables now for the ordinary range, but they have straight cuts.Gustavsson: You had to know exactly how many centimeters to fit on the pallet. We have long pallets and also for shipping, we do know exactly. Otherwise they destroy the table in the corners when they’re filling the trucks.Wihlborg: Sometimes you want it to be a couple of centimeters bigger to just become the best function, but then you need to shrink it down to fit the pallet.Gustavsson: And it’s also for you to take it home in the car as a customer. You cannot do as big as we want to sometimes.Top photo courtesy IkeaRelated Reading: Source link