I don’t know about you, but after about 45 minutes in Ikea, I usually feel as though I’m suffering from a lack of oxygen and gravity. Perhaps, then, it is appropriate that the Swedish furniture and lifestyle brand — and home-wrecker — should be launching a range of modular products inspired by space travel.
It is due in stores by 2020, by which time humanity may have given up on the ridiculous notion of looking for a new planet to live on and decided to get on with the much less dangerous and expensive business of cleaning up the one we have.
Sadly, that’s not likely when the easier option is to let Elon Musk and company busy themselves with the ridiculous dream of colonising Mars. Meanwhile, the rest of us will feed our consumerist addiction for household items with ones that popularise the idea.
Ikea’s space collection is said to have been inspired by the visit of a team from the brand to Nasa’s Mars Desert Research Station, in Utah. They say they explored the needs of people who would live in small urban spaces in the future.
They also took inspiration from some capsule hotels in Tokyo, where they presumably investigated the challenge of trying to sleep without turning over.
Advertisement
The star of the range, which will be called Rumtid — of course — is a modular system of timber veneers rolled into tubes of various lengths. The maker says they can be built into almost anything. The tubes will be held together with clamps, a bit like scaffolding.
Ikea says that Rumtid can be used to build sofas, wardrobes and beds.
Ikea has split its space-age range into four smaller collections, based on the themes of time, small space, water and air.
Items pictured in the publicity material being flat-packed to interiors journalists include lamps that look as though they could have been ripped off the outside of a Mars rover, boxy retro air purifiers and natty visions of tiny indoor gardens.
Next time you see that spaced-out look on the face of a customer emerging from an Ikea store, it may amount to more than the effect of negotiating the hostile, alien terrain for an afternoon.