Noboru Nakamura

Noboru Nakamura (1938–2023) was a Japanese furniture designer whose brief but extraordinarily productive time at IKEA gave the world two of the company’s most enduring pieces. Born in Hokkaido, Japan, he moved to Sweden in the late 1960s to study at the Carl Malmsten School for Furniture Studies and subsequently at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. He joined IKEA as an in-house designer in Älmhult in 1972 and remained there until 1979.

Nakamura arrived at a moment when IKEA was pushing hard to bring high-quality, modern furniture to mass audiences at low prices. His brief was to design a bentwood cantilever armchair using laminated birch veneer, a material associated with prestigious names like Alvar Aalto and Bruno Mathsson, but never yet made affordable at scale. The result was POEM, launched in the 1976 IKEA catalogue and reprinted on its cover the following year. POEM’s U-shaped bentwood frame produced a gentle, yielding flex that Nakamura described as a tool for “emotional richness”, a chair that lets the sitter swing slightly rather than sit rigid. It remained in the catalogue until 1991, when an updated version was introduced under the name POÄNG; that chair remains in production today and has sold over 30 million units worldwide.

Nakamura’s second landmark piece, the KLIPPAN sofa, was developed with product manager Lars Engman and launched in 1979. Engineered around a removable, machine-washable cover, sized to fit standard 150 cm fabric rolls, KLIPPAN solved a practical problem every family with children understood. Like POEM, it has never left the IKEA catalogue.

After returning to Japan in 1979, Nakamura founded Furniture Design Nacka and taught design at Hokkaido University. He passed away on 18 April 2023, leaving a legacy anchored in two chairs that defined a generation of democratic design.