Ikea Marked Sweden's Sunniest Spot With a Pair of Big Stone Chairs

Can it become a tourist destination?

Thanks to Ikea, visitors to Gotland, an island off Sweden’s east coast, can sit a spell and soak up the scenery in a pair of huge granite armchairs, each weighing close to 1,000 pounds.

But they better wear shades.

Using two decades of meteorological data, the retailer determined the nation’s sunniest square meter and built a monument on the spot resembling a pair of Ikea’s SKARPÖ chairs.

Developed with Åkestam Holst NoA, the project seeks to create a summer travel destination. At the very least, the work should help bolster Ikea’s image as a prime provider of outdoor furniture.

“Swedes have a special relationship with sunshine,” agency copywriter Rickard Beskow tells Muse. “Every summer we compare weather forecasts, discuss where the sun shines the most and plan our holidays accordingly. Yet nobody had ever tried to answer the question properly: Where is Sweden’s sunniest spot?”

“We became slightly obsessed with finding the answer. What started as a simple observation turned into a almost 2-year-long search involving 20 years of weather data and detailed geographical analysis.”

The goal, he says, was taking a basic Ikea promise “to its absolute extreme.”

“Ikea is also known for making good design accessible to the many. Here, Ikea used that same philosophy to make Sweden’s sunniest place accessible to everyone. Not just as a data point, but as a real place to visit, sit down and enjoy. It might be the heaviest expression of democratic design Ikea has ever created.”

As the installation came to fruition, “There was something wonderfully absurd about watching people carefully maneuver a giant stone Ikea chair into position and treat it like a national monument.”

BTW, the chairs are located smack in the middle of a cow pasture. So, along with sunglasses, visitors might want to wear a thick pair of boots, too.