Vintage Ikea furnishings fetch £32,000 at auction in Stockholm

Furniture and homewares from the 50s to 90s are coming to be recognised as collector’s items

A selection of 122 secondhand Ikea furnishings fetched a total of £32,000 at an auction in Stockholm on Monday night, as some of the cheap and cheerful flatpack retailer’s more unusual designs are coming to be recognised as collector’s items.

Vintage furnishings that went under the hammer at Stockholms Auktionsverk, the world’s oldest auction house, included tableware, furniture, mirrors and lights. While many of the auctioned items dated back to the 1950s, when Ikea still manufactured its furniture in Sweden, the collection also included porcelain tableware that the retailer developed in collaboration with Stockholm’s National Museum in the 1990s.