Thursday September 4th 2025
IKEA: Magical Patterns exhibition at Dovecot Studios. Photo by Phil Wilkinson
Written by Midlothian View Reporter, Liam Eunson
A collaboration between Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios and IKEA, ‘IKEA: Magical Patterns’, is being displayed at the world renowned tapestry studio in the heart of Ediburgh, exploring six decades of colourful and interesting textile design by IKEA.
Being the first time the Swedish design company has lent out an exhibition from their museum in Almoholt, Sweden, Dovecot organised the exhibition after years of talks with IKEA to showcase 80 unique and iconic fabrics that showcase the rich history of the Swedish furniture retailer’s commitment to innovation and experimental design.
Upon my visit, I was welcomed into the exhibition with a blast of colour as hundreds of fabrics draped from the roof and walls, alongside well curated display’s and IKEA showroom lookalikes. With the organisation and curation perfectly showcasing bright and unique designs, the fabrics on display had all been designs of IKEA’s talented and creative textile designers from over six decades.
Opened on July the 18th of this year and ending on the 17th of January next year, the exhibition showcases the best of IKEA’s textile design skills, previewing textiles from some of the company’s most iconic designers.
With IKEA never having a touring exhibition and their designs being only showcased in their museum, the exhibition at home at Dovecot Studios came after years of communication between the director and curators at Dovecot and IKEA’s Almoholt museum. With Dovecot’s director, Calia Joicey, seeing the repurposing of an old warehouse into a museum by IKEA that showcased textile art, she thought that it would be amazing to bring to the UK.
During my visit to the exhibition I spoke to Dovecot’s curator and exhibition manager, Heather Carroll, who explained:
“I think the exhibition is quite significant because it’s something unusual. I think a lot of us are familiar with IKEA but what’s been really nice about this exhibition is that when we’ve been giving tours, you get a lot of stories and nostalgia from people.”
“For us, we’re a tapestry studio, but we can’t have specifically just tapestry on display all the time. It’s good to have a bit of variety but we try to have a sort of loose connection and one of the thighs that this exhibition highlights is how important textiles are in a home to make a good interior design.”
With colourful and vibrant fabrics and tapestries covering the studio’s white walls, the blank background acts as a canvas to showcase the best textile design the global design giant IKEA can produce.
Tracking back into IKEA’s archives, it allowed for a historical view of how design has changed with the sheer amount of items on display being shocking. Traditionally, in Northern Europe
“It’s very colourful and we are all about colour here and why not preview one of our most colourful exhibitions. I think it’s just something new and different, especially because there hasn’t been an IKEA exhibition tour yet. We were quite keen to bring thet into the UK.”
Speaking to Heather, I asked her about the process of organising such a significant exhibition.
“I think it was because we were just very persuasive. It was years ago, well before I joined Dovecot.
“It took a lot of persuasion because the IKEA museum was just up and running in 2016 but to actually make this happen, we have been in talks with them for the last two years, sepciafically only about this exhibition.”
“When they took downtheir space, it was all about packing it up and getting it ready to be shipped off and even though this is such a big, bright exhibition, everythi g came in three crates which is amazing to think about. Lots of long cardboard rollers with a lot of fabric rolled around it and lots of cushion covers.”
The curration of the exhibition space was impressive, showcasing hundreds of tapestries along with the creative addition of an iconic IKEA showroom lookalike. Being a bright space with a ‘fake’ living room created with a bright and colurful sofa gifted for use by the IKEA store in Edinburgh.
IKEA room set on display at the exhibition with a pattern-heavy sofa landed by IKEA Edinburgh and the walls designed and painted by art students.
Founded in the 1940’s, IKEA didn’t begin to adapt bold colours and patterns into their designs until it became popular in the 1960’s due to the theme of Swedish homes being very neutral prior. Now, after the start of their museum in 2016, they have displayed their most bold and colourful collection of tapestries and fabrics at an iconic Scottish landmark for textile art and design.
Featuring designs from a large selection of designers, the most interesting was a collection of 10-gruppen’s work, who are a bold group of ten Swedish who came together in the 1970’s and ‘broke away’ from the traditional and conservative styles of design and embraced bold graphics and vibrant colours that heavily inspired pop-culture at the time. Having a large section of the exhibition, 10-gruppen’s work is one of the highlights with their iconic work draping from the sealing and walls to provide a massive pop of colour.
Aside from the tapestries and the IKEA showroom lookalike, glass cases are placed throughout the exhibition space featuring art essentials from both popular IKEA designers of today and designers from Dovecot, showcasing their artistic work space through a perfect still of pencils, pens, stencils and anything else that they use to express their art.
Due to difficulties adding wallpaper to the exhibition rooms walls, Heather and her curation team invited art students from Edinburgh and Rhode Island to design the walls in the exhibition’s showroom lookalike.
Heather explained, “We had lovely student volunteers who were recent graduates from Edinburgh College of Art and Rhode Island School of Design. They created a wallpaper for us by recycling old paint and bubble wrap that we had in our store room by printing a pattern with it on the walls and it seems to go perfectly with the exhibition.”
“I love working with creatives, especially young creatives. They come in with lots of capacity and energy that I probably just don’t have anymore. So we were quite happy to put them in what was a blank space and say, make an IKEA room set out of it.”
With Heather explaining that since the exhibition began in July it has been popular, seeing ‘lots of new faces’ come through Dovecot’s doors, she is hoping that the popularity will continue until its end at the beginning of next year.
IKEA’s first ever touring exhibition being at home for the first time in Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios is a significant milestone for both the studio’s success and the art culture of Scotland, encouraging the furniture design giants to lend them their most iconic fabrics. With no plans to collaborate with IKEA again in the future, this historic art milestone of pattern-heavy fabrics and bright and unusual tapestries is only available for a short while.
Asking their usual price of £12.50 for entry, ‘IKEA: Magical Patterns’ is one of those unusual once in a while exhibitions that offer both an artistic look into the worlds most popular furniture companies alongside what makes Dovecit studios such an iconic Scottish institution.
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