EYE-CATCHING TODAY, ICONIC TOMORROW: INSIDE THE IKEA PS 2026 COLLECTION

Those three Democratic Design Days were a blur. It took us less than two hours by train from Copenhagen to reach this little Swedish town called Almhult, the historic heart of Ikea and home of its mothership.

- IGAN D’BAYAN

It is a one-vinyl-store, village-like area straight out of a piece of Scandinavian cinema where it’s cold, calm, and serene on the outside, but bursting with life on the inside. It was the total opposite of my current life in the Groundhog Day subdivision filled with Zumba and pickleball obsessives. That trip was a big, bold, beautiful haze (to steal a phrase from the real Homelander) of talks, museum tours, house visits, dinners, drinks, and jazz-playing Swedes. Even now, I miss those daily routines. We stayed at the Ikea Hotel with its unlimited coffee and sparkling water as well as all things comfy and, well, Ikea. We were treated to dinner at MUMS (Meeting & Museum Spaces), which was festooned with scarlet as far as the eye could see, weirdly reminding me of the ‘Red Wedding’ in Game of Thrones. (Thankfully, no throats were slit. It rained, though).

We also found ourselves standing next to an almost eight-foot, teal installation of a Vallo watering can designed by Monika Mulder, darkly realizing it might hold just enough freshwater for an AI to generate a picture of Jesus as bodybuilder or a reel of your uncle flying in a Superman costume. A short bus ride on day three brought us to Loshult — a rustic, Scandinavian Noir-esque village — to visit the homes of designers who work for Ikea. We saw farmlands punctuated by picturesque houses in Swedish Falu red. But, most importantly, we attended the launch of the much-awaited Ikea PS 2026 Collection with each piece exhibited — ambiently lit, museum-style — at the original Ikea store in Handelsvagen.

We also sat down with their design brain trust and discussed the new lineup: eye-catching today, iconic tomorrow.