Why vintage Ikea and ’70s electronics are now rated not dated

“They don’t make them like this any more,” said the out-of-breath former owner of the wavy pastel slime-green dresser I’d just purchased. We’d finally managed to manoeuvre the surprisingly heavy piece up a flight of stairs, down my building’s long corridor and into my front room.

She wasn’t wrong. It’s well made and solidly constructed. And, as she continued to wax lyrical about the dresser, I struggled to hide my glee at what was my best, most impressive furniture find to date. You might be shocked to learn that the piece she was mourning — and that I was over the moon about — was an almost 30-year-old Ikea dresser, the Vajer. When it was first released in 1995, it retailed for €99. But it now sells for anything from a reasonable £325 to a more princely sum of £582.

Vintage Ikea furniture, lighting and homewares can now go for serious money. And it’s not the only type of formerly underloved design that’s being reassessed in the public consciousness. Retro electronics, council housing, municipal buildings, “Black modernism” and more now appear on the growing list of democratic design under reconsideration. The trend has been encouraged by enterprising creatives like Harry Stayt, the artist behind the site BILLY.forsale (the name is a clever nod to Ikea’s best-selling bookcase), which began as a personal collection of the Swedish furniture giant’s vintage designs. Stayt has a fascination with Ikea that dates back to childhood visits to the stores, but which was solidified while he was at art school 10 years ago and started looking into ­consumerism within furniture. “I thought Ikea was an interesting one because it was . . . something that everyone can relate to,” he says. “Everyone owns something from Ikea or has done before.”

Stayt’s research led him to old catalogues, then to auctions and internet marketplaces. “I just started slowly buying pieces when I found them cheaply online,” he says. “And then I had a big collection that I was growing with the intention of doing an installation or . . . art project with.”

But then the pandemic hit and he changed tack. During lockdown he realised he had “so much of this furniture I’d just been storing and doing nothing with”, he decided to archive and sell all of it, which proved a resounding success. Stayt had nearly 100 pieces for sale. In less than an hour, they’d all gone. He describes the experience as “pretty shocking”.

His experience encapsulates the growing demand for vintage Ikea pieces, a market that’s being fostered and nurtured by those bringing it to the cultural forefront. When I ask Stayt about this, he agrees that he’s partly responsible for its newfound popularity. He tries to “treat each object like a kind of artefact or museum piece”, which helps people view them in a completely different light. He also points to their price. Even as these items become increasingly sought after, they’re still much more affordable than other designer furniture from these eras, so there’s less of a barrier to access. And, perhaps most importantly, says Stayt, “the furniture’s really fun. Lots of the stuff is really colourful, with interesting, kind of unusual designs.”

A modicum of “fun” and playfulness really does have a role in the resurgence of these formerly “dated” designs, and the work of Dutch designer Jaro Gielens is a case in point. His collection of disused small home appliances from the 1960s to the 1990s has evolved into an archive of more than 1,450 items including 282 coffee makers, 220 hair dryers and 75 teeth-cleaning devices to name just a few. It has also spawned a popular Instagram account (@soft_electronics) and his 2022 book, Soft Electronics: Iconic Retro Design for Household Products in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Soft electronics is the term coined by Gielens to describe the devices he catalogues, which had mixed success as they “were geared towards women . . . [but were] all designed and constructed by men”. But that label and its definition go a long way to explaining the pieces’ attractive aesthetic and timelessness. As Gielens puts it, soft electronics are a “category of industrial design where simple technical devices are translated into useful and appealing tools that are user-friendly. These items also have style, quality and value, which makes consumers want to keep and care for them for an extended period of time.”

Despite their quietly enduring appeal, before Gielens started collecting them in 2017, soft electronics were slowly being lost to the annals of time. It was this that spurred him to start his archive: “Someone had to do it,” he says. And that someone was him. He quickly built up his collection, amassing several hundred items a year through eBay and private sellers across Europe. For rarer items, he ventured further from home, acquiring a mint condition Electrolux N15 stand mixer, a Melitta Mr Kitchen food processor and a Mr Ice Cream electric ice-cream maker from Japan.

Soft electronics have style, quality and value, which makes consumers want to keep and care for them for an extended period of time

“There’s nothing like it. No one is collecting these types of products,” Gielens explains. “Also, the information available is very limited. Someone had to get all the items together and find out more about who created them, how they were made.” Part archive, part collection, part museum, and very rarely for sale, Soft Electronics is a singular project preserving the past while capturing the evolution of under-appreciated devices and encouraging people to challenge their understanding of everyday objects.

Gielens’ collection is meticulously stored in a 90 sq m studio. The pieces are typically in pristine condition and always come with the original packaging. The latter, he explains, is of the utmost importance because it provides so much information, from instructions on how to use the products to context on the era they were used in. Gielens hopes such details will encourage people interested in these small home electronics to be much more adventurous. There’s a lot of vintage appliances out there, a significant number of which are in mint condition, and as long as they’re used with care, they can easily be worked into our modern lives.

It’s not just products that we’re rediscovering. Formerly overlooked or snubbed buildings are also being re-examined. Ten years ago, London-based designer Stefi Orazi was living in a studio in the Golden Lane Estate, a celebrated Grade II-listed 1950s housing complex in the City of London. She decided she needed more space but struggled to find it in the area, so she started to research other estates. “I became fascinated with the history and the optimism of the postwar era,” she says, explaining the genesis of her blog Modernist Estates. “I’d trawl online property sites, and then list them on the blog with some history.”

Back then, there wasn’t nearly as much interest in the council estates she was documenting as there is today. Orazi attributes this partly to there being less of a stigma attached to public housing now than when she was “growing up [on an estate] during [Margaret] Thatcher’s government”. But primarily, like vintage Ikea hero pieces and retro electronics, it’s about democratic, quality design that’s accessible.

“If you compare much of the council housing of the postwar era to what’s being built today, you appreciate how much more thought was given to the designs and the quality and space of it,” Orazi says. She goes on to explain there weren’t many opportunities for architects to work in private practice at the time, so many of the country’s most talented architects worked for local councils. “Perhaps they were naive, but there was a genuine belief that they were building for a better society, and that everyone deserved a decent home.”

Orazi’s interest in modernist estates, and her work in researching and archiving them, has undoubtedly played a role in introducing them to a wider audience that continues to grow. That expanding interest reflects the way her blog has organically evolved into so many different projects since its inception, among them five books, including Modernist Estates: The buildings and the people who live in them, published in 2015.

Two years after releasing her first book, Orazi also launched Modernist Estates Lettings. “I had gained a big audience, through my blog, who were interested in modernist architecture, and I wanted to create something useful . . . I wanted to connect tenants and landlords so that they would actually meet each other, to cut out the estate agent,” she says. Another opportunity was born out of the early days of lockdown, during which Orazi took to sharing pictures of the modernist houses she had discovered while exploring Highgate and Hampstead. “A few people asked me about my routes, so I thought I could create printed maps of them,” she says. And so came a series of walking (and later cycling) guides.

Harry Stayt had nearly 100 Ikea pieces for sale in his archive. In less than an hour, they’d all gone. He describes the experience as ‘pretty shocking’

It’s Modernist Estates’ most recent venture, though, that most effectively captures the very real and growing audience for formerly underloved modernist and mid-century pieces and properties: an online marketplace. The stylish yet streamlined site has private sellers advertising a 1970s chrome tubular table alongside a pair of mid-century armchairs, as well as a vintage enthusiast seeking out a Vitsoe shelving system and a summer let for a Norman Starrett-designed townhouse in south London.

There’s so much life, knowledge and history in these previously neglected designs, although not everyone sees it that way yet. I recently failed to convince a septuagenarian selling a 15-year-old Ikea lamp for £30 on Facebook Marketplace that I was serious about buying it sight unseen and hiring a courier to transport it from Yorkshire to London. To her, it’s old tat. But to me, it’s a super-rare vintage postmodern lamp.

Cherish Rufus is a production journalist on FT Weekend Magazine. @cherishrufus

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