IKEA’s GREJSIMOJS collection will turn your home into a playground
With the GREJSIMOJS collection, the brand is daring to offer an alternative vision of the home, one where fun and joy are intrinsically embedded in domestic life.
When was the last time you played? Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us internalised the message that play is frivolous, something to be outgrown along with scraped knees and bedtime stories. Yet, play is essential to our wellbeing, reducing stress and sparking creativity. For children, it is how they make sense of the world and develop crucial skills.
While our living spaces have evolved from playgrounds into backdrops for the serious business of adult life, IKEA is making a brave statement: your home should make you smile. The Swedish furniture giant’s new GREJSIMOJS collection launches globally in February 2026, entering homes to transform everyday objects into whimsical characters, from giraffe lamps to mouse-shaped bluetooth speakers, all in the name of play.
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The collection is as much fun as it is grounded in research, through IKEA’s 2024 Play Report, which surveyed 7000 children and parents across seven countries. It revealed that parents increasingly view play as essential to happiness and wellbeing, with 95% of them believing that their child’s happiness is closely tied to how much they play. However, there is a significant gap between desire and reality, as only 51% of children are satisfied with their playtime, and 54% of parents wish they could play more with their children.
Through the GREJSIMOJS collection, IKEA is attempting to solve this gap by integrating play in families’ daily home decor, adding touches of childlike wonder to our usually normal and boring objects. Offering 33 products ranging from €2 to €115, the collection allows entire homes to become play spaces, letting children feel like fun is a priority in their house, even when their parents cannot fully focus on playing with them.
The work emerged from an unconventional creative process, where 20 designers gathered for a workshop with a single goal: create products that make people smile. Karin Blindh Petersen, the Development Leader at IKEA, explains that the collection “is designed to invite people of all ages to play in different ways, in every room of the house”, focusing on objects that work simultaneously as design pieces for adults and play spaces for children. Designer Marta Krupińska, who created several pieces, including the giraffe lamp, tells us that designers were invited to explore their own relationship with play, thinking about activities that bring them joy and help them lose track of time with their inner child.
Designer Ellen Hallström, who created the rocking bird based on her childhood memory of a beloved broken toucan toy, emphasises that the collection draws on timeless needs. Children of today require the same things as children a century ago: imagination, activity, and movement. The goal was to create furniture and toys that trascend trends.
As home design increasingly prioritises order and clean lines, this collection dares to be joyful, messy, and fun. GREJSIMOJS challenges the notion that design must be serious, that adult spaces cannot accomodate whimsy. As the designers discovered during their process, play isn’t just something we do, it’s a state of mind, an approach to life that helps us to explore, connect, and grow, reminding us that life is full of wonder. And in a time that often feels too serious, too fast, and too uncertain, it might be one of the most important principles of all.
