IKEA's experimental PS collection returned on 14 May 2026 — its first edition in nearly a decade, since 2017 — with more than 40 products by 12 designers under the theme of playful functionality, available in stores and online worldwide, and most pieces costing under £100, Dezeen's 13 May review reports.
What launched?
The pieces read like a design-school brief. Ellen Hallström's birch-plywood easy chair assembles like a jigsaw puzzle and retails for £60; Mikael Axelsson's inflatable easy chair encloses its blow-up seat in a tubular metal frame, reviving a 1990s idea that, as IKEA's own page admits, frankly fell flat the first time; Marta Krupińska's rocking bench is an adult seesaw; and Lex Pott's floor uplighter converts to a reading light on a newly developed 45-degree hinge, per Dezeen's roundup. IKEA creative leader Maria O'Brian told Dezeen that PS is where the brand lets its designers go a bit more wild — the everyday range has more constraints.
Why does the return matter?
Because PS is IKEA's laboratory, and the brand frames it in its own documentation as good design and function at a low price since 1995 — this is the tenth collection in thirty years, per the brand's collection pages, which also document the craft connections: Maria Vinka's vases hand-blown by a master glassblower in Småland, and Friso Wiersma's woven-pine cabinet celebrating IKEA's woodworkers. An affordable solid-pine reworking of the 1970s Guide shelf and a £60 all-timber armchair put material honesty at mass-market prices — the segment where documented solid-wood seating is rare.
How did New York greet it?
The collection landed inside design week. Architectural Digest's NYCxDesign guide lists IKEA's SoHo PS collection debut among the week's new openings, alongside collectible-design shows — a useful reminder of the range's spread. The documented comparison across May's launches is stark: at one end, a £60 plywood chair and an under-£100 lamp; at the other, Cuff Studio's Petal Promenade collection with upholstery in Scalamandré fabrics, per the AD PRO guide. Same city, same month, two definitions of playful furniture — and the gap between them is exactly where most readers actually shop.
What else is in the range?
The deeper cut of the collection shows the same wit in quieter rooms. Matilda Lindstam Nilsson's chair-bed gives a nod to the 1970s with a low, pocket-sprung seat cradled in tubular steel; Marta Krupińska's table clock takes its form from a periscope in bright red; Ola Wihlborg's sofa-bed is built with the same foam and supportive pocket-spring design as a mattress. Wiersma appears twice — the woven-pine cabinet and the Guide-inspired shelving — and Michelle Armas contributes rugs and a cushion cover made with a blooming ink technique she describes as souls communicating. The brand's own quiz, written to introduce the collection, is candid about the experiment's spirit: these are functional products that bend, peek, hide, snap, rock and even inflate. Pott's uplighter, previewed on Dezeen, became the outlet's most-read design story of the month — a signal of how hungry readers were for the range's return.
