A selection of 122 secondhand Ikea furnishings fetched a total of £32,000 at an auction in Stockholm on Monday night, as some of the cheap and cheerful flatpack retailer’s more unusual designs are coming to be recognised as collectors’ items.
Vintage furnishings that went under the hammer at Stockholms Auktionsverk, the world’s oldest auction house, included tableware, furniture, mirrors and lights. While many of the auctioned items dated back to the 1950s, when Ikea still manufactured its furniture in Sweden, the collection also included porcelain tableware that the retailer developed in collaboration with Stockholm’s National Museum in the 1990s.
The most eye-catching sale of the night was a red Impala sofa by Gillis Lundgren, the late veteran Ikea designer who also came up with the ubiquitous Billy bookself. Sold in Ikea stores for the equivalent of £103 in 1972, it fetched £1,700 on Monday night.
“There’s a lot of Ikea furniture to which we as an auction house would say ‘No thank you,’” said Ulrika Ruding, Stockholms Auktionsverk’s head of applied arts. “But then there are items that have something special or an unusual story, something to draw a designer’s eye.”
Two leather-covered Natura easy chairs from the 1970s, which were sold for more than £1,000 on Monday, had aroused interest because they reinterpreted classic Scandinavian furniture in interesting ways, Ruding explained. “We are seeing that the 1970s are coming back very fast at the moment.”
Known for affordable modernist designs but also slightly rickety bookshelves and sofas, Ikea is not usually associated with furniture that stands the test of time. But as the retailer celebrates its 80th birthday this year some of its earlier designs have been rediscovered by collectors and started to fetch considerable sums at auctions.
Ikea’s shearling-covered Åke chair, which resembles Danish architect Philip Arctander’s classic “clam chair”, was sold for 19,000 SEK (£1,538) at an auction in 2022.
The world record for an item of Ikea furniture sold at an auction was set last May, when designer Bengt Ruda’s limited-edition Cavelli chair went under the hammer in Stockholm for about £15,000 – a considerable mark-up on the £23 it went on sale for in 1958.
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“I’ve been working in the auction industry for almost 30 years, and if somebody when I started would have said ‘One day you will host an Ikea auction in a very nice showroom,’ I would have said ‘No, no, that’s absolutely, that’s not possible,’” the auction house’s head, Li Pamp, told Agence France-Presse.
“Ikea has in many ways been controversial,” she noted, citing the company’s history of copying and following trends and criticism of it on environmental and sustainability grounds. “But there are also some items that stand out.”
