Morten Kjelstrup & Allan Østgaard

Morten Kjelstrup, a Danish architect, and Allan Østgaard, a fashion designer, created the MAMMUT children’s furniture range for IKEA. The starting point was their own children at play and the world of comic strips; the designers’ children acted as consultants while the range was developed. The premise was simple: furniture for a child has to follow different rules than furniture for an adult, lighter, more stable, and closer to a child’s imagination than a parent’s taste.

The 1993 MAMMUT chair was voted Furniture of the Year by the magazine Sköna Hem in 1994. Early pieces were made of solid wood and particleboard on polystyrene legs; from 1999 the series was produced entirely in UV-resistant plastic. The MAMMUT lamp held in this archive belongs to that same line.

Sources: IKEA Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Design Museum Brussels.