GRAPHĒ

Ikea Might Have Just Solved One of the Biggest Problems With Its Furniture

Forget those rickety particle board shelves. The Swedish furniture giant’s new collection doesn’t require assembly and is built to move.

Picture this: you’re 19 and you’ve just moved into your first apartment. You have plenty of books and tchotchkes to store so you buy Ikea’s infamous Billy bookcase. It’s the most affordable shelving you could find without scouring Facebook Marketplace for half a lifetime and it fits all your stuff. A year passes. Your rent gets raised, you decide to move to another part of town with friends. You pack all of your odds and ends up into boxes, and break down the Billy to bring it with you. Once you get to your new place, try as you may, the Billy bookcase just won’t stand straight in the way it used to, and it now wobbles whenever anything bumps. It’s a story as old as flatpack furniture, and it’s one that Ikea’s latest collection might actually solve.

Kompishäng, which launches in U.S. stores on July 31 and online on August 15, includes 11 pieces that don’t require assembly and are designed to be easily moved. There’s range: a side table; a jute bag with handles that functions as a plant pot cover; a rolling bag on wheels that looks an awful lot like a Hulken; and a foldable desk with a built-in handle, among other first apartment basics. The smartest piece from the collection is probably the stools, which can nest like the Artek 60 for compact storage, or stand atop one another to create a shelving display. Since the pieces don’t have separate components, there aren’t pesky tools, oddly vague instructions, or the challenge of having to build them or reassemble them.

"This table isn't just a temporary solution. It's designed to accompany life's transitions - equally at home in a first apartment, a family house, or even a retirement space. — "This table isn’t just a temporary solution," says David Wahl, the designer of the collection’s foldable red table pictured here. "It’s designed to accompany life’s transitions—equally at home in a first apartment, a family house, or even a retirement space."
Courtesy of Ikea

The idea for Kompishäng—an Ikea-ism for "hanging out with friends"— was inspired by conversations between twentysomethings living in Central London and Ikea staff. Two recent industrial design graduates working as interns at Ikea also brought their firsthand experience. With input from a young set, Ikea aimed to address the most persistent irritations one faces at that particular phase of your life, namely moving often, sharing furniture with flatmates, and not having an easy way to transport anything. This involved practical solutions, like a metal bookend that sits on the floor and holds titles in place, and stylistic guidance: the interns felt that a more neutral color palette, rather than the bolds Ikea is known for, would help bring calm to these transient spaces.

"We wanted to create a collection that could be moved with your body alone. Without needing a car," Ikea designer Wiebke Braasch said in a statement shared with Dwell. "Moving plants was a bigger problem than I ever imagined, and it was fun to come up with a new solution that makes it easier to both carry and protect them while moving." Given how geared the pieces are toward lowkey moves, the practicality of these pieces also depends on them being sturdy enough that they can hold up against the banging and shoving required of those of us who move by Uber, or even the subway. Though vintage Ikea furniture may command high prices nowadays, newer pieces aren’t particularly known for their longevity.

The furniture in Kompishäng is low profile, but that’s one of its greatest assets. When dinnertime is over, the table can be folded away and the stools can cleanly stack atop each other.

Courtesy of Ikea

Even with its subdued color palette and solutions-oriented design, the furnishings mercifully still have personality; they look like they’d get along easier with used furniture than some of the more playful Ikea designs (we’re looking at you, inflatable chair). It’s also easy to imagine a new grad appreciating being able to fold this stuff up and sling it over their shoulder when it comes time to move across town. Or, if they manage to settle into some place for longer than a year, that it’ll outlast the lease.

The Internet’s Favorite Transformer Table Is Truly a Great Hack for Small-Space Hosting

Budget Breakdown: In This Hamptons Cottage, a Series of "Micro Tweaks" Add Up to a $1M Overhaul

Architecture in Formation gave a shingle-style ’90s home a well-needed refresh by reworking the layout, updating the material palette, and adding bold pops of color.

The Long Island hamlet of Springs is one of the only places out East that might still feel undiscovered. The farmland turned working-class suburb turned artists’ haven is known for shingle-style homes on modest wooded lots, where savvy weekenders now go to escape not only the hustle of New York City, but also the rest of the Hamptons summer crowd.

Before: Exterior

Before: The home had a front bay window and minimal landscaping. — Before: In 2002, lawyer Gianni Servodidio purchased a cottage in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs. The shingled home had a front bay window and minimal landscaping.
Photo courtesy of Architecture in Formation

After: Exterior

Large Anderson 400 series windows and doors create new indoor-outdoor access to the pool from the living room and dining area. — Architecture in Formation founder Matthew Bremer introduced large Anderson 400 series windows and doors to provide access to the pool from the living room and dining area.
Photo: Eric Petschek

"It’s this little enclave where you’re immune from the traffic, chaos, and pretentiousness of the rest of the Hamptons," says lawyer Gianni Servodidio, who first visited the area on a summer timeshare in his twenties. In 2002, Gianni decided that if he couldn’t yet afford to buy a home in Manhattan, he’d invest in one where he could get away from its rat race. "I landed on this quaint little house, way out deep in a rural part of the Springs, and bought it for not a lot of money," he says. Two decades later, it needed a refresh, so Gianni called his neighbor.

Before: Dining Room

Before: The dining room was the home's only space with a direct indoor-outdoor connection. — Before: The dining room was the home’s only space with an indoor/outdoor connection.
Photo courtesy of Architecture in Formation

See the full story on Dwell.com: Budget Breakdown: In This Hamptons Cottage, a Series of "Micro Tweaks" Add Up to a $1M Overhaul
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Dating Back to 1870, a Sunny Yellow Home in Charlottesville Asks $2.25M

The renovated residence still has its original moldings and windows—plus a contemporary two-story addition.

Location: 1112 Park Street, Charlottesville, Virginia

Price: $2,250,000

Year Built: 1870

Footprint: 5,340 square feet (4 bed, 4 bath)

Lot Size: 1.1 acres

From the Agent: "The owner/architects have taken one of the original stately Charlottesville homes from 1870 and brought the outdoors into the house. Keeping the charm at the front with original moldings and windows, the two-story addition flows seamlessly to the backyard. This newer build has floor-to-ceiling Spanish cedar windows with views of the 1.1-acre manicured lawn. The heart of the house has accordion doors that open completely to a sapele wood deck overlooking the 6.5-acres of green space at Davis Park. The kitchen includes custom cabinetry, a separate bar, and a large pantry. The home also has a concrete pool with a bluestone terrace, and a one-car garage."

The lush yard is home to mature plantings, and historic oak trees and tulip poplars. — The lush site is home to mature shrubs, historic oak trees, and tulip poplars.
Photo by Beth Monaco

See the full story on Dwell.com: Dating Back to 1870, a Sunny Yellow Home in Charlottesville Asks $2.25M
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In Gainesville, a Renovated 1920s Home Goes for Bold—and $584K

In the city’s historic Duckpond neighborhood, two artist-designers brought Scandinavian maximalism, custom millwork, and whimsical color to a French Eclectic house.

Location: 521 Northeast 6th Street, Gainesville, Florida

Price: $575,000

Year Built: 1920

Renovation Date: 2023

Renovation Designer: Studio Blinky

Footprint: 1,962 square feet (3 beds, 2 baths)

Lot Size: 2 acres

From the Agent: "Built in the early 1900s in Gainesville’s historic Duckpond neighborhood, this home reflects more than a century of change. In its most recent renovation, two artist-designers embraced those layers of history rather than restoring the house to any single period. Original French Eclectic details remain untouched, while Scandinavian maximalism, custom millwork, and bold color add something new. A custom wooden garden arch and blossoming landscaping frame the approach to the house. Inside, an original limestone and marble fireplace anchors the living room, while a bright blue staircase adds a pop of color. On the ground floor, a series of newly added archways connect the living room, screened sun porch, dining room, kitchen, and playroom, echoing the home’s original arched dormers. Throughout, built-ins add storage, display, and bursts of color. A tucked-away room offers flexible space for play, work, or reading. Considered updates—including skim-coated walls, refinished original floors, trimless lighting, and microcement surfaces—add contemporary notes alongside the home’s historic details. The renovated kitchen pairs Reform oak cabinetry with green countertops designed by Müller Van Severen, combining natural materials with a more playful sensibility. Three upstairs bedrooms and a shared bath sit beneath angled ceilings and dormer windows that bring light deep into the home. Built-in bookcases, a yellow stair-landing library, and lighting from Raw Color, HAY, Gubi, and others extend the design language into the home’s more private spaces."

The front walkway is framed by a custom wooden garden arch.
Photo by BlueHour Media Co.

The original limestone-and-marble fireplace is still the centerpiece of the living room. — The limestone-and-marble fireplace in the living room is original to the house.
Photo by David George

The dining room features colorful built-ins. — New archways on the ground floor connect the living room, screened sun porch, dining room, kitchen, and playroom, while nodding to the home’s original arched dormers.
Photo by David George

See the full story on Dwell.com: In Gainesville, a Renovated 1920s Home Goes for Bold—and $584K
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Another Norman Jaffe Gem Gets Bulldozed—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

I.M. Pei's Dallas City Hall is declared an endangered building, the near-collapse of Pfizer’s former New York headquarters reignites safety concerns, and more.

In May of 2025, Norman Jaffe’s Stern House in East Hampton Village was demolished, adding to a growing list of significant homes by the modernist architect that have met the fate of a bulldozer. Now, the Bliss House in Southampton, New York, has been demolished, too. Here’s how the celebrated example of organic modernism ended up a "pile of rubble" despite years of preservation efforts. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

At the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown New York, inspectors found buckled structural columns that were "bending like cigarettes," which prompted an emergency evacuation. Records show the building had already racked up numerous safety violations and worker injuries before the near-collapse. (The City Reporter)
Plans from the 1980s for an unrealized 60-story "Trump Castle" in New York City by Philip Johnson and John Burgee have resurfaced, detailing an extravagant design complete with spires, drawbridges, and even a moat. The drawings foreshadow some of Trump’s grand architectural ambitions today. (The New York Times)

A building in Midtown was emergency evacuated after its structural columns were visibly bending.

Dallas City Hall, the brutalist landmark designed by I. M. Pei, has landed on both the World Monuments Fund and Preservation Dallas lists of the nation’s most endangered places. But it might not be enough to save it: Preservation advocates warn that pressure from private developers and hefty rehabilitation costs are putting the building at risk of abandonment, and even demolition. (The Dallas Morning News)

A recent investigation revealed that a mafia-like network of unlicensed food trucks has taken over stretches of the National Mall in D.C., operating with alleged food safety violations, majorly inflated prices, and aggressive tactics that have driven out many licensed vendors. Authorities say the operation is tied to a group of repeat offenders who use shell companies to stay under the radar. (Washingtonian)

Top photo by Tim Godbold

A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

It gives depth to the ground-floor living space, made brighter by a wall-to-wall skylight and floor-to-ceiling glass doors that open onto a rear courtyard.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Bondi Junction, Sydney, Australia

Architect: Studio Carson Kelly / @studiocarsonkelly

Footprint: 1,023 square feet

Builder: First Grade

Photographer: Dina Grinberg / @dinagrinberg_

From the Architect: "For a year, the principals of Studio Carson Kelly—architect Klaus and creative director Nicholas—lived in the house as they redesigned it, studying its light, its failures, and its latent capacity before submitting a fresh scheme for approval. That period of occupation is embedded in the outcome. The planning reflects a close understanding of how a house of this scale can sustain daily life without expansion—a compression of circulation achieved through spatial logic rather than sacrifice. A dog-legged stair performs double duty as both movement and infrastructure, integrating the laundry within its form and resolving into a compact landing from which each bedroom on the first floor level occupies the full boundary-to-boundary width of the site. Redundant corridors are removed; movement is folded back into the architecture itself.

"The roof became the primary surface for introducing daylight. A series of skylights—including a boundary-to-boundary skylight at the center of the plan—draw light deep into the section, allowing it to move and shift throughout the day in a house that might otherwise read as dark and compressed. Clerestory glazing extends this vertical distribution further.

"Material selection is structured around contrast as a way of giving each zone its own register while maintaining coherence across the whole. A custom elongated brick format carries the exterior language inward, appearing underfoot in the courtyard, rising into built-in seating, and forming the enclosing walls of key interior spaces. Its recurrence across these thresholds dissolves the boundary between inside and out, allowing the courtyard to extend the living zone without additional area. At the lower level, a patchwork terrazzo field operates as a composed surface that catches light and shifts in tone across the day, anchoring the space with a quality closer to permanence than finish.

"The kitchen is conceived as a sequence of interconnected zones. Mirrored joinery defines the primary storage wall, amplifying light and extending sight lines to work against the house's narrow dimension. Intersecting this is a stainless-steel working zone whose reflective quality ties it back to the mirrored elements and maintains a coherent visual language across the space. A floating stone slab, pulled off the perimeter to allow full circulation, operates simultaneously as dining table, island, and social anchor—consolidating functions into a single monolithic object and allowing the kitchen to remain open and flexible across different modes of use.

"The bathrooms shift into a more immersive material register. Stone is handled as an enveloping surface rather than an applied finish, wrapped and varied in scale across mosaic, elongated formats, and larger slabs. Glass brick introduces a softer atmospheric layer in the primary bedroom within the otherwise rectilinear geometry: a circular aperture formed from square units that reads as a moment of visual relief within the ordered framework, filtering light into a diffused glow while obscuring sight lines with depth and texture. The primary ensuite carries this furthest—a generous shower volume set beneath a full skylight that opens directly to sky and tree canopy above."

See the full story on Dwell.com: A Mirrored Kitchen Makes This Very Narrow Sydney Terrace Home Feel Much Larger Than It Is

From the Archive: A Closer Look at Artist Jim Isermann’s Pattern Happy Universe

"Ultimately, I still believe in the pragmatic populist ideal that nothing is beneath being improved by being well designed," the designer—whose work spans tiles, handmade rugs, paintings, and more—told Dwell 20 years ago.

Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the June 2006 issue.

Many contemporary visual artists are mining the reservoirs of design history in their art practice. Museum exhibitions on the conflation of "art" and "design" abound, generating new discourses and practices that blur critical distinctions between the two realms. One of the artists who has been at the vanguard of these concerns is Palm Springs, California-based Jim Isermann.

Over the last 25 years, Isermann has combined the functional and the aesthetic in complex but surprisingly undidactic work that has consistently provoked questions about the status of art and design. Focusing on the fertile exchange of visual information between high art and postwar industrial design, Isermann has created (among other work) wall hangings, handmade woven rugs and tiles, and vacuum-molded wall modules that seem to celebrate—in the boldest sense—idealized and unmediated visual pleasure.

Today, Isermann divides his work between large-scale commissions like a 9,000-pound chandelier for Genentech Hall, in University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay Campus; gallery shows; and new projects, which include the most recent iT House decals and a graphic pattern for fashion designer Trina Turk’s spring line. On the occasion of his recent Deitch Projects show in New York, we thought it was the perfect time to check in with Isermann.

Unlike the artists in last year’s Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Design ≠ Art, which featured functional designs by visual artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Rachel Whiteread, your work engages with design on another level. I see your Corvi-Mora modular wall, for example, as a portal to understanding your work. It looks commercially fabricated, but is in fact handmade.

Fabrication of work for gallery shows creates a conundrum for me because it raises all those old questions for viewers as to whether the work is "art" or "design." I work with commercial manufacturers and art fabricators, and I make work by hand, depending on the project. Many artists work with fabricators, but they don’t make art that exists in this no-man’s land between art and design. Yes, at first glance the Corvi-Mora wall looks like it is commercially fabricated, but in fact I spent six months making the 112 modules myself. They are hand-painted and there is a degree of imperfection and difference between them. Like a lot of my practice, the work is not exactly what you initially think it is.

Your work has a very strong effect on its audience. I see it more in the tradition of installation and site-specific art than design, which further complicates what you do.

It’s true that what I do is very open-ended. I design, or I propose, or I make something that functions in a space and has a dual or multiple purpose because it functions as art but does not knock you over the head as being art—or as having an impenetrable concept. It is about a particular quality of experience.

I approach art making, and especially the commissioned work, from a pragmatic point of view. I want to do the best within the given limitations and give something that has a slow, long-term enjoyment that resonates with its site. When you live with something day in and day out, you become attached to it in another way.

Where do you situate yourself on the modernist map?

"Modern" is a word that has many different meanings and is often misused. I used to really be fascinated by work like Verner Panton’s that existed between modern and postmodern. He made the leap, left behind the sterile materials that all the architects were using, and took on new synthetic materials that were all about colors and shapes. It was no longer about ergonomics and organic materials. Instead, he invented a supersaturated color theory and was famous for saying, "One sits more comfortably on a color one likes." I love that stuff. It exists for reasons other than the modern rules. It doesn’t do that postmodern thing, looking backwards—it is very optimistic and forward-looking.

You mentioned that you visited artist Donald Judd’s home and that, in your view, he really was an interior decorator. He made furniture and was obsessive about placement. Do you identify with the term "interior decorator"?

I cavalierly use the word "decorator": I am old enough to have grown up without openly gay role models. Homosexuals were accepted as florists, hairdressers, and, yes, interior decorators. I am not very militantly gay, but when I identify myself as a decorator it is as close as I get to being so. I do think my work has a gay melancholy or sensibility that is very difficult to talk about, and is not available to all.

The art critic Dave Hickey has referred to your work as having a "utopian optimism" that is "essentially domestic" and of the moment. Can you address the idea of utopia?

I guess I do aim for the perfect ideal. The early work was about the failure of modernism’s utopia to solve all the problems with good design for all. So there is a built-in melancholy of that not being achieved. With some of my newer work, there is the physical reality of human imperfection in hand-fabricating modules. Ultimately, I still believe in the pragmatic populist ideal that nothing is beneath being improved by being well designed. And I continue to remake the world piece by piece, object by object.

Photo by Tom Powel Imaging / Courtesy Jim Isermann and Deitch Projects

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

From the Archive: Remembering Alexander Girard, the American Master of Colorful Modernism