IKEA’s new Allen Lamp: tightening the success of the Swedish powerhouse?

Earlier this month, Swedish furniture mogul, IKEA, announced the launch of its latest collaboration: a 10-piece homeware collection that brings together the work by five different artists and designers. Amongst the collection is Japanese design studio Gelchop’s lamp, duly christened (because every IKEA item has got to have its own name), Allen.

Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself, “why the prosaic, anglophone name? Why not come up with another Swedish moniker to sit amongst the Poängs and the Kallaxs? Is this a reference to some other, more illustrious, Allen? A Woody or a Ginsberg maybe?” Fear not: IKEA has neither lost its Swedish charm, nor has it taken to naming homeware items after directors with dubious morals.

No, the Allen lamp, as even the slightest of glances at the object in question will affirm, is so-called because it has been made in the image of IKEA’s unsung hero: the humble Allen key.

“The Allen key symbolises the essence of IKEA but it’s rarely at the centre of attention,” commented Ryota Morikawa, co-founder of Gelchop. “As a tool that is used to assemble furniture, the Allen wrench has a small, insignificant existence. But I have changed it into a larger item that is different from its everyday size.”

Indeed, the upscaled Allen has something of the Gulliverian about it: either we’ve shrunk or the world is suddenly on steroids. The question is: is the Allen Lamp the latest Scandi design classic, or is it the final nail in the coffin (or Allen in the bolt, as the case may be) for IKEA? The jury’s out. 

The miracle of matches and fishes

The Swedish powerhouse started life when its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, was only 17 years old. At the age of five, Kamprad understood more about the machinations of capitalism that most people ever do: buying matches in bulk, he would cycle around his village to sell them at a profit.

Before long, Kamprad was buying and selling stocks of fish, Christmas decorations, plant seeds, and ballpoint pens: the IKEA Market Hall was born. By 1943, Kamprad had established his own mail-order firm, which he named IKEA, an acronym that combined his initials with his childhood address (his parents farm, Elmtaryd was situated in the parish Agunnaryd). 

Such were the inauspicious beginnings of IKEA, the capitalist dream of a precocious child. By 1965, Kamprad had opened IKEA’s first Stockholm store. The capital city’s IKEA was housed in a purpose-built, circular building, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, which had opened in New York City six years earlier.

The architectural influence says a lot about how IKEA saw itself: by now, Kamprad had shifted his vision from matches and fish to furniture. The 60s was the decade of Modernist Scandi design, remember, and IKEA was tuning itself to a growing consumer economy.

If Kamprad understood the economy, he also understood the virtues of an economic enterprise: that is to say, he realised that mass-producing cheap furniture would rocket him to the top. Early in IKEA’s history, Kamprad had figured out that the cost of delivery keeps overheads high.

And so, in a masterstroke, Kamprad made IKEA the first fully self-service warehouse: it even sold roof racks so that its customers could bundle the maximum number of items home as possible. Even today, in the age of the internet, IKEA keeps its delivery costs prohibitively high. Ever considered ordering some of their mind-bogglingly cheap cutlery online? Think again – the delivery costs will put 6 flimsy teaspoons on a par with a set of antique silverware. 

Suburban simulacrum 

In cutting delivery costs, Kamprad turned IKEA into so much more than a stockist – it became a theme park for homeowners, a surreal simulacrum of family life. My own childhood is well stocked with memories of IKEA days out, whole Saturday afternoons spent roaming around the windowless showrooms, and emerging blinking into Croydon’s industrial heartland, absolutely disoriented, like a veal calf’s exposure to the sun.

Or, the strange spate of after-school trips we took, when my parents were kitting out their kitchen, arriving to eat a meatball-dinner from the canteen, in which we somehow became part of the showroom, before perusing the warehouse after-dark.  

From start to finish, the IKEA experience is participatory: it’s the immersive installation of the furniture world. Because, as any IKEA enthusiast will tell you, the fun doesn’t end at the showroom. Next, the anticipation of the warehouse search: the horror at finding an empty shelf, whose number corresponds to the one you’ve jotted down with your stubby, wooden pencil.

But that’s just the yin to the yang of the joy at successfully locating your flat-packed item, sliding the box off the enormous shelf, trolleying out into the carpark, manoeuvring it onto your roof rack – and back off again at the other side.

And still the game goes on, because now you have to unpack the cardboard, make sure the little pieces are safely in order, and start working through the instructions like grown-up lego. R. Fuchs captured the all-encompassing IKEA experience, in his 1991 book, Isn’t It Great to be Swedish, when he wrote that: “Life is like assembling IKEA furniture: it’s hard to understand what the point is; you’re unable to put the pieces together, some essential part is always missing, and the final result is never at all what you hoped for.” 

Array

Is that a massive Allen key on the floor? 

Speaking of games, the release of the Allen lamp follows hot on the heels of another new IKEA collection: a set of swivel chairs, adjustable desks, and integrated cupholders, purpose-built for the dedicated gamer. To the non-gaming eye, there’s something dystopian about the collection: a series of tangible, real-world items, designed to lock you into whichever virtual reality you choose to step.

They look more like instruments of psychic incarceration to me – but hey, I’m probably behind the times. Luddite or technocrat, what remains striking, is seeing how the old world is trying to keep up with the new. The more virtual our lives become, the less we want stuff – so how can IKEA keep selling it to us? And is the IKEA theme park beginning to lose its lustre?

The Allen Lamp strikes me as the perfect expression of this dilemma. I can picture it in two different home scenarios: the first, a student flat, where the Allen Lamp has become a jokey aside, a slightly naff present from mum and dad, lying sadly amongst other detritus, somewhere on a floor; the second, an architect’s beautifully designed pad, carefully arranged up against an artful stack of coffee table books: “Oh, didn’t you know, it was designed by Gelchop? Limited edition, actually, had to queue online for hours. Yah, yah, design classic, yah.”

Touted as moveable, the Allen key can either be propped against a wall or lain on its side. Sounds like clutter to me – “Hey, what’s that massive Allen key doing on the floor? Tidy up your tools after your IKEA trip, please.” 

Allen ever follows function  

I can’t help but feel as though the Allen Lamp sounds the premature death knell for IKEA. Don’t get me wrong, it’s always done the odd wacky accessory (my cousin, as a small child, had a huge heart-shaped cushion from IKEA, which, for some reason, had long arms, always threatening embrace. Her parents nicknamed it Russel Hearty; unsurprisingly, she was terrified of it. We once found her trying to flush Russell down a toilet), but the Allen Lamp’s mistake was to market itself as the latest in cutting edge design. 

The old IKEA accessories were loveable in their off-kilter weirdness – and above all, a sign of how little IKEA had to try. We were going to buy the furniture anyway, and we’d probably end up chucking in a Russell Hearty or two – but the Allen Lamp wears its desperate bid for relevance on its sleeve (not to mention the fact that its postmodern, Jeff Koons-esque irreverence renders it twenty years out of date).

Let’s be honest, it’s an Emperor’s New Clothes affair: who really wants a massive, illuminated Allen Key lying around? It might be the unsung hero of IKEA, but maybe there’s a reason we haven’t intoned its praises.

As the architect Louis Sullivan sagely noted, “form ever follows function” – in other words, let the Allen key do its job, and let IKEA stick to what it knows best: functional and economical flatpack furniture. It’s what we love you for, IKEA.