I have a confession to make. I am a design critic, and my house is full of Ikea products. There are Billy bookcases and Tarva chests of drawers, Vate table lamps and Pokal glasses galore. We have odd 1950s things from junk shops too, stuff made by friends, and one hallowed Eames side table, but it’s certainly no designer den.
But according to BBC Antiques Roadshow expert Judith Miller, our global addiction to the Swedish flat-pack giant is a cause for concern, partly to blame for “killing off the antiques trade” and spawning a national crisis of individual taste. While Ikea continues to boom, operating 392 stores in 48 countries and selling £35bn-worth of cheap ’n’ cheerful Scandi goods last year, prices for antiques have plummeted to their lowest levels since the 1930s.
“It’s very sad,” said Miller, speaking at a London antiques fair last week. “In some ways, it’s laziness, in some ways it’s because we’re quite busy, but I think it’s also people feeling that they don’t know what to buy.”
So, in the interests of sparking our impoverished interior imaginations, here are six furniture classics to fuel your junk-shop foraging instincts and get your taste buds going beyond what those nice, blonde, bland boxed kits with funny names and occassionally missing Allen keys have to offer.
1 Emeco 1006, 1944
First built for use on US navy submarines – and nicknamed the Navy chair as a result – the Emeco 1006 has become a timeless symbol of no-nonsense American manufacturing, up there with Zippo lighters and button-fly Levis. Going into mass production after the war, it became the standard-issue chair for prisons, hospitals and government offices, and was revived in the 2000s when Philippe Starck was commissioned to produce a range that riffed off the classic design. It might look as if it’s machine cast in a single form, but it is still handmade from rolled sheet aluminium in a two-week long, 77-step process of forming, welding, grinding, heat-treating, finishing and anodizing – and guaranteed to last 150 years as a result, making it one to hand down to the great-great-grandchildren.
Original: £493
Endless cheap imitations are available, in all manner of colours and materials, from around £50 online.
2 Red Blue Chair, by Gerrit Rietveld, 1918
The Mondrian painting that leapt off the canvas to become a chair, Gerrit Rietveld’s iconic Red Blue Chair might look like a punishing thing to sit on, but it is actually one of the most comfortable of the design classics around – and much better for you than something squishy, such as Le Corbusier’s “Grand Confort” armchair. As ergonomics gurus have since pointed out, its significant backward tilt means your back is naturally pushed against the flat surface of the back, allowing the spine to decompress and encouraging the shoulders, rib cage and pelvis to open up. Rietveld thought of his chairs as a kind of equipment, a means of physically “toning up” bodies that were neglected during the working day. Remember his mantra: “zitten” (to sit) is an active not a passive verb.
Original: £1,759
Or you can try out your woodworking skills and make your own, thanks to a handy manual, How to Construct Rietveld Furniture, by Peter Drijver.
3 Tiffany lamp
First created in the 1890s by American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, the Tiffany lamp has enjoyed ups and downs in popularity over the years, but these gaudy art nouveau confections of stained glass refuse to go away. As cultural commentator Aline Saarinen (wife of organic modernist architect, Eero) noted in the 1950s, they were at “the peak of chic around 1900”, but had fallen “to the gutter of derision around 1920 to 1930”. Andy Warhol had a huge Tiffany lamp in his New York apartment, as part of his “Victorian surrealist” interior decor, prompting Saarinen to comment that they are for people who “like what is out of favour for perversity’s sake”. So ugly that they must be great.
Originals: £3250 – £2.3m at auction.
They have been so successful over the decades that “Tiffany” has become a catch-all word for any kind of stained glass lamp. Thousands of varieties available on eBay, from £30, or have a rummage in your local market.
4 Jacobean joint stool
As featured in Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, the joint stool is perhaps the most ubiquitous piece of furniture in all of western civilisation, commonplace in European homes of all social classes for centuries. Consisting of four robust turned legs and a simple top, connected by 16 mortise and tenon joints, it was the everyday, all-purpose stool, often used around a dining table, under which they could be tucked when not in use. It is a favourite of V&A furniture curator Nick Humphrey, who describes it as “a 400-year-old workhorse: a stool, a table, something to stand on to reach a shelf – and often used to rest coffins on. It is a simple witness to life and death.”
Jacobean antique version: £15,000
Get scouring your local junk shops and you may well find a bargain, otherwise you can pick up replicas online for around £75.
5 Fornasetti cabinet by Piero Fornasetti /Gio Ponti, 1951
A chunk of Renaissance cityscape compressed into a cabinet, the “Trumeau Architettura” (or architectural cabinet) was a collaboration between Italian surrealist artist Piero Fornasetti and designer Gio Ponti, first shown at the 1951 Milan Triennale. Inspired by 16th-century Italian mannerist art, its doors open to reveal classical colonnades disappearing into the distance, while images of vaulted undercrofts extend below. Lithographs were created for each section, printed on to transfer sheets, and then applied to fibreboard panels – but you could create your own by printing out a picture of your favourite building and doing a bit of DIY decoupage on your Ikea cupboard, right?
Original: £120,000
EBay and Etsy are crawling with “Fornasetti style” furniture, mostly horrible, but a darn sight cheaper than the real thing, with wallpapered wardrobes for about £175.
6 Opendesk
You want that Ikea wardrobe, but it doesn’t quite fit in the alcove? Or you’ve spotted a nice dining table, but it would be better if it was a bit longer? Young east London start-up company Opendesk have invented an ingenious online platform for open-source furniture designs that can be customised, downloaded and made locally, anywhere in the world, cutting out the middle-man supplier and reducing waste, transport and storage costs. As economist John Maynard Keynes put it: “It is easier to ship recipes than cakes or biscuits.” Sister company WikiHouse is applying the same idea to architecture: in the future you might be downloading your own home.
Prices vary; studio desk from: £399
