ikea catalog

ikea catalog

Pages out of history

Most of what is in the Ikea catalog could have been designed sometime between 1915 and 1965. Some lines head back even further, paying homage to Swedish antiques and old-time country furniture. A tiny handful of pieces, however, echo current trends on design’s neglected cutting edge. These objects make an ironic nod to older styles, or they hybridize the old and new, or they take on the shapes of other objects. They are more high-concept than high-modern.

Trollsta: A new line of sideboards and small tables that join a crisp, modernist top to a base cut out to have the outline of hand-carved Chippendale legs. Modernism’s rejection of the past here turns into a satirical salute to it.

Hampen: This polypropylene rug looks like a swatch of emerald sod cut out and planted in your living room. It’s advertised in the catalog on a page of “green” — or green-seeming — objects under the headline “RENEW with a touch of nature.” Stridently ecological products are certainly on design’s vanguard, but this all-plastic rug may be more about depicting the natural than embracing it. Which itself is the kind of tongue-in-cheek gesture that a very few younger designers are exploring.

Lampan: A table lamp, in glossy red plastic, that has been cast into the shape of a dowdy lamp with pleated shade. Its $5 price is so low that it, too, feels almost like an absurdist gesture, helping Lampan thumb its nose at everything that’s fancy and high-class.