11 June 2016

Fast Co. Design: A First Look At IKEA's New Museum

The museum is located in what was once IKEA's first retail store, and it features many of the usual suspects. The Billy bookshelf and Klippan sofa—the two most-produced IKEA items ever—have dedicated installations. A series of "period rooms" brim with IKEA furniture and accessories from the archives (complete with decade-accurate computers, magazines, and ephemera). The curators strove for historical faithfulness—nothing was reproduced or reissued for the rooms—and put out a call for submissions to obtain certain pieces from customers that they didn't have themselves. Even the humble meatball (which has had its fair share of controversy over the years) gets the gallery treatment. The most rabid fans can also snap a selfie in a set done up like the cover of an IKEA catalog.

In recent years, the company has made efforts to deepen its design credibility, bring more customers into the fold (the brand sees its 800 million customers in 2015 as just a drop in the bucket compared with the world's population of 7 billion), and attempt to dispel the stereotype that the brand only sells cheap, mass-producible design. The museum gives IKEA a place to tell its story exactly the way it wants. But it omits some of the darker chapters of IKEA's history (as far as I could tell on a recent tour of the space, which was still under construction): Kamprad's alleged Nazi ties, the company's logging practices, and more.

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