Could you be sitting on an Ikea ‘antique’ worth a fortune?

IT’S a brand more associated with meatballs and allen keys than investment opportunities and designer prices.

But an Ikea armchair bought for just £20 has sold at auction for more than £15,000 – setting a new world record for a piece made by the Swedish manufacturer.

The Cavelli armchair – one of five – was designed for Ikea in 1959.

While it has some way to go before it can be considered an antique – UK customs regulations say an item must have been made 100 years sale – Ikea items appear to be commanding similar prices to vintage pieces.

The armchair sold for £15,500 in Stockholm this month and is just one of several items which have been auctioned over the years at Bukowskis, a Swedish auction house bought by the UK-owned Bonhams firm.

An Impala armchair, designed for Ikea to sell at £80 in 1972, sold at the auction house for almost £2,000 in 2020. Two copies of the £23 bold lacquered metal armchair, Oti, designed in 1986, sold for £875 in 2016.

Other auction houses in Sweden have also seen Ikea items being sold for huge prices. At Wright auction house, an Ake armchair, which cost just under £16 in 1956, sold for as much as £2,863 this April. And a pair of £4.50 Skopa armchairs designed in 1970 by Ole Gjerlov-Knudsen and Torben Lind went for £210 in 2016 at the same place. A £160

Skye recliner, which was designed for Ikea in the 1980s, sold for £770 in September 2020 at Stadsauktion Sundsvall. Ponbefore tus Silfverstolpe, Swedish antiques expert and founder of auction search site Barnebys, 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 ’50s and ’80s from Ikea that costs more and more on the second-hand market. Some of these famous Ikea designs by leading artists can be considered collector’s items.

‘It would not surprise me if in time some of this furniture ends up in one of the world’s major design museums.’

‘Considered collector’s items’