The father of shelf-help
Designer who created Ikea’s iconic Billy bookcase also pioneered ‘flat-pack’ concept that transformed market
Return for a moment to the Ikea monkey and what some wags rued was a missed chance for a great marketing tie-in by the Swedish furniture giant: “Even Darwin can assemble our Billy bookcase!”
A staple of college dorm rooms, basements and first apartments worldwide, the Billy bookcase’s origins are almost cliché: In1979, Ikea designer Billy Liljedahl complained that he wanted “a proper bookcase just for books.” Fellow Swede Gillis Lundgren complied with a sketch on a napkin and the first plain units, in oak and pine, were launched the same year.
Lundgren, who died Feb. 25 at the age of 86, went on to design about 200 pieces of furniture for Ikea. But he was best known as “the father of Billy,” noted a 15-page company history issued on the 30th anniversary of the low-priced, no-frills bookcase.
He certainly was fertile: as of 2009, Ikea had sold 41 million of the bookcases worldwide and the item today, made mainly of particle board, comes in dozens of sizes, colours, veneers, height extenders and shelf configurations, cranked out at the rate of one every four seconds.
Apartmenttherapy.com dubbed it “the world’s most versatile bookcase.”
“Anyone can come up with an expensive solution,” Lundgren said in the 2009 company retrospective. “It’s harder to make something more reasonably priced that most people can afford.”
He was born in Lund, Sweden, in1929 and studied at the Malmo Institute of Technology before starting out as draftsman. He became Ikea’s fourth employee in 1953, hired to manage the catalogue.
Lundgren also pioneered the “flat-pack” concept that transformed the inexpensive furniture market, when, after a photo shoot for the catalogue in the 1950s, he unscrewed the legs of a table so it could fit into a car.
“We had our first flat parcel and thus we started a revolution,” Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad recalled in the 1998 book, Lead
ing by Design: The Ikea Story.
Said Toronto custom furniture maker Steve Wallin: “He did help propel a revolution in the furniture world, but for the worse, in my opinion.”
Yes, millions have been sold “and I’m sure even more Big Macs. But have either been good for the world? Would anyone in the culinary world honour the creator of that iconic sandwich?”
Billy has been very good to Michael Smith, a Halifax entrepreneur who has made a tidy living for several years with a delivery service to Ikea-deprived Maritimers.
Each month, he heads to outlets in Montreal and Ottawa and loads two trucks with everything from bedroom sets to kitchen sinks for eager customers, who pay cheaper delivery rates than if they order from the catalogue.
Smith said about 4 per cent of the roughly $3.5 million worth of Ikea wares he’s hauled back east since 2011 has been the Billy line.
“That’s a lot,” Smith told the Star in the midst of one of his runs.
Ikea’s effective advertising and mass production account for Billy’s low price — one reason for its enduring popularity, said
“(Billy) doesn’t aspire to be any more than what it is. It is hard to design something that is nearly invisible.”
GORDON PETERAN OCAD UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR
Tony Livas, who teaches cabinet making at Humber College and is a fine-furniture maker.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with the quality, although the quality is reasonable,” Livas said. And their construction and style are very, very simple. “Sometimes, beauty lies in simplicity.”
Adds Gordon Peteran, professor of furniture design at OCAD University: “From a fashionista standpoint, they weren’t much perhaps, but I think Ikea products are brilliant . . . (Billy) doesn’t aspire to be any more than what it is. It is hard to design something that is nearly invisible.”
In 2007, Billy got what Ikea called a “girl- friend,” Bergsbo, “for larger and wider books.”
Lundgren’s legacy may one day be regarded as quaint. “A bookcase,” he once reasoned with Scandinavian plainness, “is primarily for storing books.”
But as the Economist posited in 2011, to see how profoundly digitization is changing the book business, look to the shelves.
Ikea was then introducing a new, deeper version of the Billy bookcase and was promoting glass doors.
“The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee table tome,” the magazine sniffed, “anything, that is, except books that are actually read.”
Lundgren’s own design philosophy was as straightforward as using a little hex wrench: “At the end of the day, I design for many people. All my products are simple, practical and timeless. They should be useful, no matter how old you are or what your life situation is.”