Times change, but most basic furniture in a home is still needed. Dining tables and chairs have the same main function today as they did a thousand years ago. Beds and wardrobes are pretty much the same, although people are now generally taller and have more money, so we need longer, wider beds and bigger closets for our clothes.
Extinct furniture
From necessary to unnecessary
Is there such a thing as furniture that will never come back, despite our nostalgic love of retro? Furniture that we simply couldn’t do without in the past, but has now long been forgotten? What’s a telephone table? How do you use a chamber pot cabinet, and who’s supposed to sit on a sewing pouffe?
This bedside table with a special place for a chamber pot appeared in the 1951 catalogue. It came in natural-coloured elm, elm- or mahogany-coloured birch, and light or dark polished high-grade pine.
Chamber pot cabinets have appeared in the IKEA range various times over the years, such as LEKSVIK from 2006. Before that there were, for example, HADELAND and NARVIK in the 1990s.
The chamber pot cabinet was a crucial piece of furniture in the 18th century bedroom. When IKEA introduced its 18th century range in the 1990s, one piece was the SANDBRO cabinet, based on a Gustavian original from circa 1770 at Sandbro Manor outside Uppsala.
One piece of furniture that seems to have vanished completely is the chamber pot cabinet – although IKEA preferred the less descriptive term “night cabinet” in the early 1950s. In those days, many Swedish homes still had no running water or drains, and outside toilets were common both in urban areas and in the countryside.
In posher homes a commode was sometimes used, a kind of wooden armchair – in castles and manors they were often upholstered in silk and velvet – with a lid covering the actual pot. In regular homes though, the chamber pot cabinet was a life-saver, either during the night or when the weather was bad. Starting in the mid-1950s, more and more Swedish homes had porcelain toilets installed.
The general-purpose SERVO shelf was ideal for smokers and phone-chatters. From ikéa-nytt 1950.
This SPARTA telephone table was called a “vibrant new product” in the 1956 IKEA catalogue. The phone went on the green mosaic shelf, and underneath it there was room for “several telephone books”.
Furniture with a purpose
Much of the furniture in those early IKEA catalogues from the 1950s had a clear purpose. There were quite wordy and persuasive descriptions of how to use the furniture, from knitting chairs and homework desks to dining-room furniture and hallway drawers. The 1950 ikéa-nytt included a ‘universal’ or general-purpose shelf. Customers could decide themselves whether to use SERVO as a bedside table, a telephone shelf, or perhaps a smoking table for a pipe stand and ashtray.
A few years later, in 1954, far more Swedish homes had a phone, and this was when the first dedicated telephone shelf came to IKEA, appropriately named TELE. It was later followed by SPARTA, a telephone table with a seat, ideal for people who liked a long chat on the phone. It also featured a shelf for paper, pen and phone books.
The TOSCA hall table suitable for a telephone or flowers, here in the 1962 IKEA catalogue.
The RELING hallway piece, with a seat for long phone calls and shelves for phone books, appeared back in 1990. Image from the 1992 IKEA catalogue.
TELE, a simple telephone shelf in rattan with a glass shelf, from the 1954 IKEA catalogue.
DÄVERT from 1993 with a mint-green ‘Cobra’ telephone matching the seating cushion. This was the last piece of furniture that IKEA called a telephone bench. At the end of the Noughties, IKEA stopped showing landline phones in the catalogues altogether.
The telephone table was almost always placed in the hallway, next to the phone jack in the wall. Only very wealthy people could afford to have a phone in more than one room. It would be decades before people thought of putting a phone just about anywhere, even on the floor or the bathroom wall. Not until the first mobile phones came along, around the new millennium, did telephone tables start disappearing from the IKEA range.
Stylish desks like EXKLUSIV were often pictured with a man in a suit, working away and thinking important thoughts. From the 1969 IKEA catalogue.
In 1951, the EMMA easy chair was presented as a “knitting chair”, and was “what every housewife wants”.
The 1973 catalogue included MAMMI, a “modern emma (or knitting chair)” that was presented more subtly than in 1951.
The clever sewing table ANITA from the 1966 IKEA catalogue was described as a “utility piece that no woman can be without … A treasured gift on her birthday”.
“To the delight of all men”, the 1960 IKEA catalogue featured bar fittings that went with the BOREN, ROXEN and TEMA cabinets. The fittings had “electric lighting”, as well as a “drawer for cigarettes, cards and game chips”, for example.
As the rustic style came into fashion in the 1960s, bridal hope chests returned, in a modern version. Here, in the 1963 IKEA catalogue, they were described as ideal for “romantic girls”, “something for teenage girls to keep their sewing and embroidery in – for the future”.
The RIGA kitchen table in the 1954 catalogue was described as having “all kinds of features that a housewife values”. A multifunctional table with two ironing boards, a solid baking board, a cutting board and knife drawer – all in one for just 62 kronor (EUR 6.20)!
From housewife to gender neutral
The 1950s and ’60s IKEA catalogues often mentioned who was supposed to use a particular piece of furniture or a particular room in the house. For example, the “man of the house” was recommended the “masculine” desks that he could put in the “boss’s room” or in his “home office”. The images showed men in suits in front of well-filled bookcases and smoking cabinets. The “housewife” on the other hand should sit comfortably in her knitting chair with her feet up on a sewing pouffe, while young girls would lie on a soft rug and “spin some discs”.
Today, IKEA has long since stopped dividing consumers into men of the house and homemakers, young lads and lasses. The children play in every room, activities are not linked to a particular age or gender, and hobbies can just as easily be practised on the kitchen table or hallway floor.
During the 1970 and ’80s, IKEA sold a lot of furniture for hobby rooms and family rooms. The HOBBY workbench featured in the catalogue 1970–1974. A modern version came along in 2005 with UDDABO, which was voted furniture of the year by interiors magazine Sköna Hem. Image from the 1973 IKEA catalogue.
Extinct rooms
It’s not only furniture that has become extinct; some rooms have too. Few families today have a family room with cosy furniture, table tennis table and bar cabinet. Even the hobby room, an almost mandatory feature of a 1970s Swedish home, has virtually disappeared. The final rustic pine workbench appeared in the 2005 IKEA catalogue, after a three-decade break. The good value weaving loom only appeared in the 1982 IKEA catalogue.
In the 1980s, a lot of people did sewing, knitting, crocheting and weaving at home. So in the 1982 IKEA catalogue, reasonably priced looms made a brief appearance.
Wall bars for home gymnastics in the children’s room were popular in the 1970s. Here in the 1974 IKEA catalogue.
IKEA no longer has what it used to call “dining room suites” in its range, i.e. full sets of matching table, chairs and sideboard. This is partly because a lot of people nowadays prefer to eat in the kitchen or in front of a screen, and partly because modern consumers prefer to mix and match their furniture themselves.
Another uncommon room in modern times is the drawing room or parlour, particularly in the homes of single people or families with young children. It was a room with fine furniture and ornaments, although it was rarely used for spending time in.
A fat-screen TV, VCR, VHS tapes and a chunky remote control – there was room for it all in the SLÖR stereo and video bench in the 1985 IKEA catalogue.
The SLUP stereo unit was built upwards to accommodate vinyls and musical notebooks, as well as a record player, amplifier and cassette player. Image from the 1982 IKEA catalogue.
1999 saw the arrival of the OBSERVATÖR video unit for a VCR and a shelf for a fat-screen TV. Image from the 2002 IKEA catalogue.
Multimedia furniture
One of the clearest signs of changing times are the pieces of furniture for stereo and other media, which have always been a prominent part of the IKEA range. It all started with simple TV and radio stands for the first small, compact machines. As televisions and music systems grew in height and width, IKEA brought in larger and taller benches and cabinets that could also hold vinyl records, cassettes and VHS tapes. TV benches had to be able to take a huge, fat-screen TV and VCR.
The avant-garde computer desk CONNY, designed by Nicolas Cortolezzis, had foldaway shelves for keyboard, CD unit and printer. Here in the 1995 IKEA catalogue.
In the 1980s, the CD revolutionised the music and video industry. At the same time, prices for personal computers came down, and IKEA started producing computer desks with special shelves and compartments for everything from keyboards to printers and CD racks. People had been saving their texts and images onto square floppy discs, but here too the CD took over thanks to its far larger storage capacity.
The 1990s also saw the arrival of the CD tower. There were tall, narrow units full of flat, square CD covers in virtually every home – until one day there weren’t. The internet and mp3 files had arrived on the scene.
Soon, CD towers formed virtual forests in second-hand shops everywhere. Today they are often used by upcyclers to make everything from bathroom shelves to bed legs. The question is, what are the objects in our homes today that will no longer be needed in 20, 50 or 100 years? Look around you and have a think!
CD racks and towers appeared in the 1990s in all kinds of materials and imaginative shapes, before the internet and mp3 files arrived on the scene. Image from the 1994 IKEA catalogue.
