If you're having a bit of a furntiure refresh, don't be hasty. Just pause for a moment before you chuck those old pieces of Ikea furniture on to a skip or give it away to your younger siblings – because some of it might be worth thousands of pounds.
Ikea items have a reputation for being not only functional but also stylish, cheap and cheerful, so you could be forgiven for assuming they might be next to worthless. But, according to The Mirror, look beyond the flatpacks, allen keys and the impossible instruction leaflets and you could find that some examples of Ikea furniture have become design classics with a price tag to match.
For example, an Ikea armchair that sold for £20 in 1959 recently commanded a staggering £15,500 when sold at auction. The Bengt Ruda Cavelli armchair set the record for the most expensive piece of Ikea furniture ever when it was auctioned off. The chair is striking, but also extremely rare as just five chairs were ever made.
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Pontus Silfverstolpe, antiques expert and founder of Barnebys antiques website, said: "The flat package fortune continues to surprise the auction world, but we have more peaks to look forward to. It is especially designer furniture from the 1950s and 1980s from Ikea that costs more and more on the second-hand market."
Most attractive to collectors and design enthusiasts is furniture with an innovative design for its time, made of good materials and in a limited edition or manufacturing period. Ironically, the most expensive Ikea auction items today are almost always Ikea's flops, which were quickly discontinued due to lack of sales or prohibitive production costs, says Mr Silfverstolpe.
Among other valuable early designs of the Ikea furniture range sold at auction is the furniture group Åke, which was manufactured in 1952-1956 and included sofas and armchairs. In 1956 an Åke armchair cost £8, but fast forward 50 years, its price is significantly higher. In April this year, a copy sold for £2,863 when it was auctioned off at Wright.
Another hit is the 1972 Impala armchair, which sold for £80 at the time, but these chairs now sell for around £2,000 at auction. Teak furniture was very popular in the 1960s, when Ikea brought out its Monaco series of dining chairs. At the time, a set of four chairs would cost £20, but recently sold for £412.
It may not be to everyone's taste, but two of the Ikea Oti armchairs, designed in 1986, sold for £875 in 2016. That's a big step up from the £46 it would have cost to buy them in the 1980s. The lacquered metal armchair was the brainchild of now-famous designer Niels Gammelgaard.
Ikea hiked the price of products in its UK stores in December 2021 - blaming rising supply chain costs for the increases. The flatpack furniture giant says it has raised prices by 10 per cent on average, which is above the global average of 9 per cent. However, who knows what they will fetch in a few years' time?
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