Collectible design has gotten silly. Gallery representation, limited runs of eight, a stool that costs more than a car. You look at it online, but you don’t own it.
IKEA just released 22 pieces from seven designers, and nothing costs more than £200 (about $270).
The collection is called Konstrunda, which means Art Tour.
Creative leader Karin Gustavsson told Dezeen the idea was to let people live with art rather than squint at it in a museum, and that IKEA can do it “at a price that people can afford.”
Cheapest thing in it: a black-and-white vase by Italian architect Emanuele Stamuli, £19 (about $26).
Most expensive: a side table by London designer Andu Masebo, £149 (about $203).
Masebo’s Tubular Chair is the piece that made his name, the kind of object that lives in gallery viewing rooms, and the Konstrunda table wraps that same chunky frame around something you can just buy.
He also made two geometric stools, one raw pine, one a hard bright blue, that double as plinths for whatever else you’re collecting.
The rest of it is properly weird, in the good way.
In-house designer Akanksha Deo made a vessel shaped like a stacked-block character, meant to keep you company.
Swedish artist Lisa Reiser blew a run of glass vases based on her own daydreams, including a green one that looks exactly like a gummy candy.
Lisa Hilland made a bent orange sculpture that does nothing at all, which we mean as a compliment. Ingrid Leander and Igor Holtermann pulled cushions and a rug out of Stockholm’s zebra crossings and caution banners.
Gustavsson calls all of it art objects. IKEA apparently doesn’t see art and design as separate things, and the brief here was expression, not solving a problem. You can tell.
What we find interesting is that the price came first. £200 was the ceiling, and the design happened underneath it.
That’s why you see pine instead of walnut and paint instead of veneer, and honestly some of it is better for the constraint. It usually is.
See the entire Konstrunda line on IKEA’s website.
Photography courtesy of IKEA. First reported by Dezeen.
This idea is roughly the logic behind everything we stock at the Moss and Fog Shop as well, so here’s the same idea at three price points.
From the Shop
