‘The point was giving ordinary people access to bold taste’: how Ikea brought pattern into the home

Ikea is more than a furniture store – it’s a global symbol of bold, functional and democratic design. Few brands have achieved what it has: the creation of an aesthetic language so coherent that it resonates across 63 countries of operation. That’s not just influence – it’s cultural authorship.

At the heart of this identity lies the brand’s textiles, which are almost as iconic as its flat-pack furniture. Playful and eclectic, Ikea’s patterns helped rewrite expectations of what homes could look like.

A new exhibition at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Gallery – ‘Ikea: Magical Patterns’, which opens today (18 July) and runs until 17 January 2026 – asks: how did the brand make prints, colour and visual boldness central to everyday interiors? Showcasing 180 textile designs, it celebrates those who have helped define Ikea’s visual DNA. We explored the show ahead of its opening.

The birth of a design language

In the 1940s and 50s, avant-garde textiles were usually confined to elite homes. Mass-market fabrics were muted and predictable – and often floral. Ikea, founded in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad (‘Ikea’ is an acronym formed from his name and address), was initially no different. ‘You go through the early catalogues, and everything was beige or grey,’ observes Anna Sandberg Falk, an exhibition curator at the Ikea Museum in Älmhult, Sweden. ‘Then there was this really strong idea at the beginning of the 1960s to add something – and colour was that thing.’

In the early 1960s, Kamprad made a pivotal move: not a textiles expert himself, he hired young, mostly female designers from art schools and industrial backgrounds to revamp the department. Designers such as Benita Haymach and Ann-Charlotte Andersson were given almost total creative freedom. ‘They worked with these bold – and, at the time, quite provocative and unexpected – patterns and colours, inspired by contemporary art, everyday life and youth culture. And that turned into a really strong Ikea thing – an identity we still carry today,’ notes Sandberg Falk.

Icons of innovation

One of the most influential figures of this period was textile artist Inez Svensson. From 1971, she led a shift toward geometric patterns that felt modern and punchy – designs like ‘Strix’ and ‘Strax’, noteworthy for their horizontal stripes at a time when most machines only printed vertically, and which landed on the cover of the 1972 Ikea catalogue.

Svensson also co-founded the design collective 10-Gruppen (‘Group of Ten’), which was formed with a mind to challenge the dominance of dainty florals in textiles. Its 1978 collection for Ikea introduced bold, youthful patterns and, in 1980, Svensson initiated a long-term collaboration between the group and the brand. 10-Gruppen’s work was revived in 2017 at Ikea, underscoring its lasting relevance.

Another key designer was Sven Fristedt, who joined in 1967 and introduced a range of organic, psychedelic and Nordic folk-inspired motifs (‘Myrten’, ‘Tarantella’, ‘Sommargyllen’ and ‘Alfi’) which further pushed the boundaries of what ‘tasteful’ design could look like – it could be quirky – even a bit odd. ‘They’re not weird, that’s not the right word,’ says Sandberg Falk. ‘But they’re fun in a way. There’s something curious about them.’

The golden era and beyond

The 1970s were the golden age of Ikea textiles, setting the blueprint for the brand’s future. Svensson continued to contribute graphic works into the 1980s and 90s, such as ‘Randig Banan’ (1985), the striped banana print, which returned in 2013 to much fanfare. Children’s prints by designers like Anna-Lena Emdén, including ‘Sigge Snagg’ and ‘Konrad/Pensel’, introduced humour and narrative to home goods, showing that homes could be lighthearted and imaginative – not just restrained and ‘grown-up’.

The millennium yielded patterns such as Anna Sörensson’s ‘Stockholm’ (2006), which remains popular today, and Ikea's 80th anniversary Nytillverkad collection (2023), which included ‘Svedjenäva’ (based on ‘Alfi’) and ‘Nickfibbla’ (based on ‘Strix’ and ‘Strax’).

The creative freedom that Ikea extends to its designers remains unchanged: freelance designer Ida Pettersson Preutz recalls her first brief for the brand, which was to create a pattern based on food. Inspired by ‘Randig Banan’, which she had loved as a child, she sketched broccoli (now the ‘Anniken’ print): ‘At first, the feedback was, “We like it, but we want more.” So I added a rough pencil-drawn background – and that was it. They said, “Now we’ve got it.”’ Another pattern was repeatedly rejected by clients until she showed it to Tom Hedqvist, another Ikea designer and co-founder of 10-Gruppen. ‘He pointed to the sketch that everyone else had said no to, and said, “that one”,’ Pettersson Preutz recalls.

The Ikea effect

Ikea’s approach to pattern design wasn’t just about aesthetics – it was rooted in its philosophy of accessibility, championed from the outset by the famously frugal Kamprad. ‘The starting point at Ikea is always a price that’s affordable for people,’ says Sandberg Falk. ‘Form, function and style are built around that constraint. In this model, textiles are key – they’re often the easiest way to bring design into the home without spending a fortune.’

In this way, textiles ‘[gave] ordinary people access to bold taste’, the curator continues. Ikea's patterns didn’t – and don’t – demand design literacy; they encourage creativity and play. Fabrics sold by the metre and a mix-and-match ethos (the 2024 ‘Tyg’ line, for example, features pre‑cut cotton fabrics, designed to inspire DIY and upcycling projects with no sewing skills required) empower people to be co-creators of their homes. ‘That’s one of our missions – we want to open up the design world for the many.’

'Ikea: Magical Patterns' will run until 17 January 2026 at Dovecote Gallery in Edinburgh