Folk Revival

Allmoge is the Swedish word for folk: the peasant tradition of hand-painted dowry chests, stained pine kitchen benches in falunrött red, the kurbits painting from Dalarna. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s IKEA sold this aesthetic as the counterweight to the functionalist greyness of the rest of the range. While KONTIKI and TAJT held the catalogue covers, deeper inside waited LEKSVIK, KORPILOMBOLO, SVALÖV: heavy pine, wrought-iron hinges, casein-red paint.

It was not pastiche. Kamprad came from Småland and remembered these pieces from the family home. Allmoge in the catalogue worked as a national anchor at moments when the rest of the range was starting to look too international. The opening spreads of the 1970s catalogues staged Hej hemma: interiors composed like postcards from the Swedish countryside, with trasmatta rag rugs and Dala-horse porcelain. The identity claim was sold alongside the furniture.

Aesthetically allmoge defies every other style in this archive: heavy where modernism is light, ornamented where hi-tech is bare, traditional where postmodernism is ironic. It is also the most enduring product line in IKEA’s history. HEMNES, LEKSVIK, FJELL and their descendants still sell in the millions, fundamentally unchanged for four decades. Polish homes of the 1980s were full of them.