Hear the word “Kallax,” and many people, particularly those outside of Sweden, will immediately think of a certain storage shelf from IKEA.
But like many of the Swedish furniture giant’s products, the shelving unit takes its name from a location in the Scandinavian country — in this case a village near Luleå in Swedish Lapland.
And although a quick internet search would likely bring up the furniture items first, round table Docksta is also known as a village north of Stockholm, while wingbacked chair Oskarshamn gets its moniker from a coastal city in southeast Sweden.
In an attempt to reclaim the names of popular IKEA products, the Swedish tourist board launched a campaign, Discover the Originals, matching them to their namesakes back in 2022.
IKEA-themed road trip
And this July, advertising copywriter Kevin Lynch, originally from Chicago, took things one step further when he set off on an IKEA-inspired road trip around Sweden.
Over the course of two weeks, Lynch, accompanied by his puppy Umlaut, visited all 21 counties in Sweden, stopping off at places with IKEA products named after them.
The 4,600-kilometer trip, which lasted two weeks, saw the pair travel to the likes of Läckö, which has a series of wrought-iron furniture named for it, and the northern Västmanland town of Norberg, which shares its name with a wall-mounted table.
According to Lynch, who has lived in Malmö, Sweden for around three years, it was actually his wife who came up with the idea for the trip.
“I’m pretty sure it was just to make me go away for a while,” he jokes, before pointing out that his wife spends more time in IKEA stores than he does.
An avid traveler, Lynch says he’s always been a fan of “quirky” trips, once turning up at an airport and buying a ticket for a flight headed to a destination he hadn’t ever been to, which turned out to be Gdansk, Poland.
“I was ready to freeze or sweat,” he says, before explaining that he became accustomed to living an unpredictable life while residing in China many years ago, and tries to “tap into that part of the human experience” whenever he can.
After moving to Sweden in 2021 and finding himself in a home filled with IKEA furniture, Lynch was intrigued.
“I can’t say I’m a big shopper, so I’m not there (in IKEA stores) too often,” he admits.
“But I knew enough to know that the names of the products were kind of funky sounding, and that a lot of them had taken their names from different places around Sweden.”
Quirky trip
When the IKEA-themed road trip was suggested to him, Lynch quickly realized that it would be a fantastic way of seeing parts of the country he’d likely never visit otherwise, and soon began researching some of the namesakes of various products in all of Sweden’s counties.
“I planned about half of it before going,” he explains. “Just to have some sense of knowing kind of where the trip would lead.”
As he wanted to ensure that he visited a “nice diversity of places,” Lynch picked out products named for destinations with beautiful sights, such as Örskär, an island and lighthouse station situated on the Uppland coastline that shares its name with a nest of tables, as well as “little farm towns.”
“The goal was really just to make sure that I had a unique experience in each of them,” he adds.
“But hopefully to have enough people around there, that I could ask some of the locals, ‘Hey, did you know that an IKEA product is named after your town?’ And if so, get any sort of reaction from that.”
Beginning in Malmö, Lynch took a ferry ride to Tärnö, an island in the Blekinge archipelago that happens to have a collection of outdoor furniture named for it.
“The first one was quite an adventure,” he says. “It was this little island that has two residents in the winter and about 500 residents in the summer. So there’s not much to do other than a little bit of hiking around.”
After exploring the area, and visiting its lighthouse, which happens to be the oldest wooden lighthouse still in operation, he went on to visit Norraryd, in the Kronoberg County, which has spindle chair named in its honor.
As some of the destinations were closer together, Lynch was able to visit several places on his list in one day at times.
And he ended up spending several days in those that were slightly more difficult to reach, such as the Gotland County, where Lauters, a hamlet otherwise known as an IKEA lamp, can be found.
“Some of them were literally just like little spits of land,” he says. “There were a number of towns that didn’t have a stop light.
“They were really, really small. So it didn’t take too long to kind of check it out… It was probably an average of a little bit under one day in each place.”
During the course of the trip, Lynch and Umlaut took around 10 ferry rides, and mainly bedded down in hotels, although they slept in their rental car overnight on one occasion.
“The trail basically went up the kind of east coast along the Baltic Sea border, and then came down towards the Norwegian border, and then straight through the middle,” he explains.
“It kind of makes for a nice oval. So it worked out pretty well.”
Unimpressed locals
While heading to Örskär, Lynch fondly recalls arriving at the dock with Umlaut and climbing on board what he assumed was a ferry to the island, before asking the captain when they’d be returning.
“He looked at me confused…” he recounts. “It turned out, we had accidentally joined a four–hour guided nature walk, all in Swedish…”
According to Lynch, it’s experiences like these that motivate him to keep seeking out new adventures again and again.
“I think it’s those moments that kind of make you feel the most alive,” he says. “Just hopping onto this thing, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know where this is going.’ I love that feeling.”
While chatting to locals in the spots he visited, Lynch often found that many “had no idea” that the area shared its name with an IKEA product, and weren’t particularly excited when he pointed it out to them.
“Maybe five places we went to, the people were aware of it,” he says. “And being from the United States, I kind of feel like if you lived in a town that had some claim to fame like that…
“Oh my gosh, you’d have like a T-shirt shop celebrating it. It’d be like parades. I mean, it would really get a ton of attention.
“And I think it’s probably reflective of Swedish culture that they’re like, ‘You had to name it something. Might as well name it (after) this town.’ People seemed fairly unimpressed.”
Although Lynch points out that some of the product name choices seemed logical, such as bathroom items named after a river or a lake, others were less so.
Different lens
“You get to some of those places and you’re like, ‘I don’t even know how they found this on a map, much less (thought) that this is worthy of a really, really beautifully designed lamp,’” he says.
Of the many places he visited during the course of trip, Lynch says that Frösön, a larger island situated in in Lake Storsjön, which has a collection of cushions and cushion covers named in its honor, is the destination he’s most keen to return to.
“In the winter, apparently it has a nice little sort of ski hill,” he explains. “And I’d love to show my wife that place in particular. It was really, really special.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lynch hasn’t been in to an IKEA store — there are at least 21 in Sweden alone — since taking the road trip earlier this year.
However, he admits that after spending so much time thinking about its furniture products and talking to people about the significance of the names behind them, he’ll never be able to look at IKEA furniture in the same way again.
“There are a lot of ones that I didn’t get to,” he says, adding that he’s hoping to go on a music-inspired trip next. “So I will definitely have a different lens on it.”
When asked if he’s heard from the furniture giant since returning from the memorable trip, Lynch says he knows “a couple of folks who work there” and has been in touch with them, but hasn’t heard anything back.
“I think they were kind of amused,” he says. “But I think I thought it was more amusing, maybe, than they did.”
