About 10 years ago in Spain, the concept of IKEA was absolutely revolutionary. Here, investing in custom-made furniture when you formed your own family and started building your own home was almost a rite of passage in the complex process of becoming an adult. When I was a child, some friends of the family found the need to furnish a small apartment on the beach, and they told us about this kind of huge furniture store that existed abroad in which you bought the pieces you needed and you assembled your furniture according to your needs. Some time later, when I was about 15 years old, I knew what they were talking about when I visited for the first time one of the few IKEA stores in Spain, which was located in Barcelona, ​​and in which I bought my first Nordic filling and some cushions that I still keep around at home with a certain nostalgia.

I never thought we would have an IKEA store in Valencia. 5 years have passed since they opened it. It seems incredible that so much time has already passed! To celebrate their landing in the city, IKEA Spain team together with the Escuela Superior de Arte y Diseño (EASD) and the designer Bárbaja Torrijos organized an event last week at the Valencia store where they showed us some capsule collections designed no less than with IKEA's fabrics! I really liked the philosophy behind this event , because I think it played very well with what IKEA means, which is that all their products are "hackable" and that, despite what the catalog or the exhibitions at the store shows, there is not one of their products that can not be used beyond what has been invented for but, everything depends on your imagination. Thus, a shelf can be from a place to place books vertically, to a seat with storage if you put it in the correct position; curtain and duvets, they do not have to be just used to darken spaces or fill them if you make the correct cuts and folds.

I am very grateful to the IKEA Spain team, to the management of the EASD and to the marketing team at Bárbara Torrijos for having invited me to this event and to be able to know these fashion proposals full of creativity and imagination. These events are a breath of fresh air in my tight schedule regarding the Final Project of Master in Architecture, and without a doubt, a fantastic platform to gather new ideas. Thank you very much and congratulations for these 5 years of experience in the city!