I Rebuilt a Rare Vintage IKEA Dresser and It Was The Ultimate DIY Journey

When I confess that I’ve never built anything with my own two hands, I don’t mean that as a flex. As a child, while my peers spent hours constructing kingdoms out of Legos, I stayed busy decorating every level of my American Girl A*G Mini’s. Even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, interior design came naturally to me, but DIY projects did not. As much as I enjoyed arts and crafts, I would enthusiastically pass on building and repairing with tools. I’ve always been a visual learner so anything that requires following an instruction manual sends me into a tizzy—I can usually figure it out after someone shows me exactly how to do something step-by-step.

I’m not proud that I’m not a handy person, but it’s simply not at the top of my repertoire when I conduct a personal SWOT analysis. This is the primary reason why I’ve often avoided buying furniture that isn’t pre-assembled for most of my adult life, unlike many of my friends who make annual trips on the IKEA ferry for a homeware haul. But this mindset changed once I began digging deeper into the radical world of vintage IKEA during the pandemic and redecorating my space. Fast-forward to last August when I was tapping through the curator Hélène Rebelo’s Instagram Stories and spotted a wavy green lacquered dresser that I was eventually able to identify as a vintage Vajer model designed by Tomas Jelinek for IKEA in 1995. The drawers were available in other sizes and colorways until 2003.

Somewhere around 48 hours later I became full-on obsessed with tracking down the Vajer, but couldn’t find it for sale anywhere in the U.S. During my intense search process, it popped up on Etsy, but was located in Berlin and shipping would have cost significantly more than the Vajer was worth. I briefly considered commissioning a designer to make a similar dresser, but deep down I knew that it would never compare to the real deal. I messaged a few New York-based dealers that specialized in vintage IKEA, but none of them had ever come across the Vajers while sourcing. The only local person I knew in possession of one got lucky on Craigslist, and the person they originally bought it from didn’t realize what a rare find it was.

Unwilling to accept defeat, I reached out to Harry Stayt, the founder of Billy, an archive of designs from IKEA that further explores the cultural legacy surrounding the brand, to inquire about how to find the Vajer. (He’s been a huge fan of the design ever since he spotted the drawers in an IKEA catalogue from the ’90s a few years ago.) As to be expected, he wasn’t familiar with any dealers in the U.S. that sold it, but he happened to be waiting on a shipment of Vajers to arrive. Stayt offered to dismantle one of the units and send all the parts flat-packed to me with the original assembly instructions if I was interested. (It only takes him about an hour to break a piece down.) A few weeks later, Stayt circled back with a reasonable quote, and I decided to move forward with the purchase after consulting with my most trusted confidants.

At the end of September, I received a delivery at my apartment that was almost bigger than my entire body. The package was so heavy that when the DHL courier finished pushing it up the stairs of my brownstone building because I couldn’t lift it, I decided to just unbox it in the mailroom to prevent further injuries. (He was totally fine, I was the one he was worried about.) 55 pieces were carefully packed inside along with a sealed envelope full of 117 nails, screws, and bolts.

Although I wasn’t confident about my building abilities, I figured that I could easily recruit someone skilled to help me reassemble the dresser. After all, I once invited a guy to come over for the sole purpose of configuring an Aalto stool, and he even gifted me a screwdriver because I didn’t have one of my own. (Reader, I returned the tool after we went our separate ways. The stool, however, is still standing strong.) But as the weeks rolled by, I felt compelled to see how much of the IKEA beauty I could manage to rebuild myself. Upon flipping through the instructions and assessing the level of difficulty, I decided to start with the drawers. An hour and a half later, I had successfully screwed all five pieces together for the set of nine. It was only when I attempted to tackle the remaining pieces that I realized that this next series of steps required at least two people to pull off.

Before I knew it, another month had flown by, and I hadn’t made much progress. But just when I was about ready to give up, a friend who loves building furniture happened to be in town and volunteered to finish the job. We spent about four hours piecing it back together, but it proved to be more challenging than either of us had anticipated. Obviously, I’m beyond pleased with the final product, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend disassembling older pieces. If you thought that modern IKEA is hard to build, the vintage versions are even more challenging. Given that Stayt, the furniture dealer, is “trying to provide as authentic an IKEA experience as possible,” I definitely felt like I got what I paid for!

Since launching the Billy website in November of 2020, he has sold 10 of the green Vajers, with most of the interest coming from overseas. Even though he’s been collecting these rare postmodern pieces for the past six years, it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that he noticed a massive surge in demand for vintage IKEA. Stayt mostly attributes this to a lack of awareness about the older designs.

“It’s been interesting to navigate as there isn’t really a predetermined value to most of the items I’m selling, as they weren’t really considered collectible to most people until recently, so often I’m determining their value myself,” Stayt says. “Now that I’m noticing more dealers selling old IKEA it’s encouraged me to be a lot more creative with how I source and to seek out the designs that perhaps haven’t had their moment yet on the reselling market. My main motivation for the project is developing the online archive, so I’m always seeking out new and rarely seen pieces from IKEA history.”

Nata cofounder Anna Hurphy spent two years looking for the green Vajer before she finally found it for sale on Facebook Marketplace this past spring. She suspects that this specific model might be harder to find now because of the recall in 2016. Stayt points out that the pivot toward minimalism drastically shifted interest in the Vajer due to their “colourful, bold, and postmodern” form, which people likely viewed as “gaudy and dated” during the aughts. (Before the Vajer was discontinued, IKEA had introduced white and beech veneer versions.) At the time, they were among the most expensive IKEA pieces as well—Stayt notes that the Vajer was originally priced at £200 in the catalogues.

“A lot of people criticize IKEA for taking strong influence from existing designs that are in vogue,” Stayt says. “I personally love identifying which iconic designs IKEA have chosen to borrow from and the ways they have attempted to make them more practical or how to produce them on a mass scale at a very low cost. You end up with these almost homogenized designs that act as a really perfect time capsule of design history from the era they were created.”