Walk into any city-dwelling twenty-something’s apartment and you can be assured of one thing: You will find something from Ikea. The Swedish purveyor of furniture is synonymous with a certain period in our lives, a time when we’re too poor and too space-limited to buy expensive investment pieces. It's not exactly a negative connotation, but there's a sense that Ikea is starter furniture, something to be upgraded from once we get a bigger apartment and more money.
Even though Ikea furniture has become the de facto choice for small-apartment interior decorating, its furniture hasn’t traditionally been designed for that purpose—a fact that becomes glaringly clear when you try to carry an Expedit up five flights of stairs.
But a new special collection from the company is designed specifically with young urbanites in mind. The PS 2014 “On the Move” collection is made up of 51 items that bend to the whims of the average millennial with a shoebox apartment and wanderlust.
>Nearly 60 percent of young American city dwellers plan to move within the next two years.
Last year, the company conducted a global survey to figure out how people are living today and made a couple of key discoveries: Nearly 60 percent of American city dwellers, between the ages of 18-29, plan to move within the next two years. And more important yet? For the first time ever, more people live in cities than they do in rural areas.
Keeping those things in mind, Peter Klinkert, Ikea’s project manager for special collections, tapped 14 designers from around the world to come up with pieces that cater to people living with less space. “Right now we felt like organization, flexibility and the small spaced living is getting more and more relevant and important,” Klinkert explains. “If you notice, there are no sofas or big chairs,” he continues. “This isn’t about the core basics, it’s about what are the additional needs and the multifunctional needs in order to make a home work?”
The items in the collection work around core pieces, filling in the perpetually blank spaces in our apartments like corners, hallways and bare floors. There are stackable plastic containers that double as a side table, and a side table that doubles as a lamp. A series of simple wooden boxes can be piled on top of each other to create a flexible, shape-shifting storage system, and a floor lamp acts like a paper holder thanks to little slits in the shade.
It’s certainly one of Ikea’s smartest collection yet, thanks to its focus on multi-tasking. You can easily imagine any of these pieces being schlepped from a 10x10 dorm room one year to a tiny first apartment next. Just to be sure, Ikea brought in 20 design students from Copenhagen to assess how relevant the products were to their lives. They narrowed 150 products down the the 51 in the final collection.
In the commercial for On the Move, you see a handful of smiling youths carrying their newly purchased Ikea goods home. A girl bikes through the street with a lamp; another rides a trolly with a side table; a pair of friends, wrapped in a comforter, hold a glowing lamp table while riding a ferris wheel at twilight. It's obviously an exaggeration. You'll want a car or at least a shipping service to get most of these pieces home, but the message is clear: Ikea doesn't want to be your throwaway furniture—it wants to go wherever you go.
The On the Move collection goes on sale April 1.
