IKEA x Raw Color: high street giant unveils rainbow-like 'Tesammans' collection with Dutch design studio

Fresh from a slew of nostalgic anniversary releases, Ikea has unveiled its upcoming collection with Eindhoven-based studio Raw Color.

The high street behemoth, which opens its Oxford Street store later this year, has enlisted the colour specialists for the firmly forward-looking ‘Tesammans’, a limited edition range of 19 pieces that harness the power of the colour spectrum.

“We’ve been really curious about colour at Ikea for many years, but we we hadn’t necessarily explored the emotional aspect – that colour plays a huge part in how you perceive your environment and how you feel,” Ikea’s Creative Leader Maria O'Brian told Homes & Property.

“We want to combine our very rational thinking and our home furniture knowledge with Raw Color’s more emotional, artistic approach.”

Raw Color duo Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar say Ikea’s enormous production capabilities facilitated new possibilities in prototyping, materiality and scale.

“It’s like you’re a solo musician and suddenly there’s a whole orchestra sitting in front of you. They play all these instruments you couldn’t play yourself,” said Brach.

“Suddenly you can scale up and produce this collection of 19 pieces. As a small studio, it would have been incredibly challenging to produce anything like this”.

In the end Brach and ter Haar settled on 15 tones – “they wouldn’t let us use black and white,” says O’Brian – after creating more than fifty prototypes in coloured paper over the three-year process.

With contrast panels and criss-crossing graphic patterns, the pieces are as much about the interaction between hues as the carefully selected shades themselves.

A pack of Rothko-esque napkins is £1.75, a mug is priced at £5, and a tiered lampshade is £19. A linear flatwoven rug, with interlocking panels in cornflower blue, green, orange and powdery pink, is the collection’s priciest piece at £199.

“Choosing a favourite piece is like choosing a favourite child, but there’s something lovely about the functionality of the trolley,” said O’Brian. “I can’t wait to have that rolling around in my home.”

Brach said their biggest departure from previous collaborations was a need to find “balance” in the collection across tableware, textiles, lighting and furniture.

“To continue the music analogy, it’s like releasing a single as a musician. It’s just one song, and it’s going to work. But if you have a whole album, you kind of need to see how the tracks are influencing each other.”

Still, O’Brian’s commercial radar has picked up on a shift within customers’ homes – and she suspects the collection will land at the perfect time.

“When the world feels like a difficult place, we actually see that sales of colour go up,” she said.

“Then I think the more people see colour in other people’s homes... maybe they start to embrace it themselves. I’m hopeful that this collection can be a starting point for people lowering that threshold for colour,” she added.

Production capabilities aside, Brach says collaborating with Ikea is a big moment for the studio. “Ikea seems to have this symbolic meaning for people. We were overwhelmed by the reaction to the announcement.”

Eindhoven has emerged as a global centre for material and colour innovation, fueled largely by the pioneering Design Academy Eindhoven. Alumni include Marcel Wanders, Sabine Marcelis and Hella Jongerius.

The collection will be available in Ikea stores globally from April. ikea.com