Functional and not too fussy: Ikea’s sleek designs look very simple. But make them up. Friso Wiersma has been chief designer for the Swedish furniture giant since 2018 and recently presented a new collection, especially for home DJs and other music fanatics. “It’s harder to make something look simple than it is to make something look complicated.”
It is true that making electronic music is becoming easier, but suitable furniture is not exactly cheap. Think of a desk with speakers that you can place at exactly the right distance from each other, or a storage cabinet for LPs on which you can also store a turntable. The Obegränsad collection makes such furniture accessible to a wider audience.
“We notice that more and more people are producing music at home,” says Wiersma, who lives and works in Sweden. He is the only Dutch full-time designer for Ikea. ,,To do something for that group, we looked for professionals who really understand what you need. That’s how we ended up at Swedish House Mafia. They come from Stockholm and therefore live relatively close to us. Moreover, they already have a very strong form language with their album covers and live shows. It was especially important that they could clearly indicate what was still missing in our collection.”
Five checkpoints
A design for Ikea always starts with the price, says Wiersma. But that’s certainly not what it’s all about. “We have five points that a good design must meet: quality, durability, function, price and form. The world is of no use to a top quality chair that is way too expensive. Or at a cheap, poor quality table. You coordinate everything with your team until they score five points equally well. That can also steer a design very well.”
The designer usually works on ten to twelve projects simultaneously. Even within the Obegränsad collection itself, the furniture was not designed one by one, he says. ,,You start with very rough sketches, purely as placeholders. A desk is then only a stripe with two sticks. Gradually everything starts to take shape, because objects become a reaction to each other. In this case, for example, the furniture became so tight and hard that we also wanted to contrast it with something softer, such as a rug.”
In his work, Wiersma always searches for the absolute essence of objects, without falling into cliché forms. He has gotten better at it over the past four years. ,,When I started, I was still very eager to have my name on something. There may have been some sort of ego involved. Now that I’ve been working there a little longer, I see the beauty in the universal. If there is little of yourself to see, it remains open to interpretation. In the design world, that is ‘no name design’ called: something that is such a foundation that no one claims it and it is always right.”
Timeless design
The Ikea designer cites hairdressing scissors as an example. “It’s such a classic thing. Sure, it was designed by someone once, but no one put their name on it and they don’t have to. Things like that never go out of style. They are simple and beautiful. It’s quite difficult to design that way, but I like the challenge.”
The new record player – the first ever designed by Ikea – was the biggest difficulty, says Wiersma. ,,It had to be plug-and-play, but still built on the essence of LPs. That means an analog music experience. If you have to connect it to a speaker via bluetooth, it no longer makes sense.”
“I’m also a big fan of playing vinyl myself,” says Wiersma. My living room is full of LPs. At Ikea we already had a series of speakers that completely blend in with your interior, but this is exactly the opposite. We give music a more physical place. Too crazy to be able to make something like that.”
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