Ikea has taken another swing at a gaming gear collection, this time with Xbox as a partner, according to WIRED. The nine-piece Yxstaby range, revealed at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, grew out of a meeting between the Xbox and Ikea design teams at Milan Design Week in 2024. Hearing that the Xbox team—including Carl Ledbetter, head of Xbox devices design—was in Milan at the same time, Ikea product design developer Philip Dilé wanted to show off the company's latest creations, the Brännboll gaming collection, which stepped away from sharp edges, RGB lighting, and a black color palette.
“That was a bit of an icebreaker,” Dilé told WIRED. “We were exploring gaming, so we wanted to team up with experts who really understand how people play. We know a lot about life at home, but we wanted to specifically understand how you design for gamers.”
From Milan Handshake to Gamescom Reveal
The Yxstaby range is the fruit of that Milan meeting, WIRED reported. Two years on, the collection takes the ethos of 2024's Brännboll—gaming gear that sits well within home decor and doesn't look like it belongs in a bachelor's basement—and moves it forward by taking liberal inspiration from Xbox design cues. The range is aimed at making it easier to bring gaming into living rooms and tuck everything away afterwards.
Notable pieces in the collection include:
- A side table on wheels that can store controllers while charging them behind sliding doors
- A toolbox that keeps cables and hardware under a lid that doubles as a laptop stand
- A gaming lounge chair with a webbed pocket underneath to stow controllers out of sight
- A rollable TV stand for screens up to 55 inches, with a split-level shelf for consoles
- A green gaming D-pad cushion
- A D-pad controller platter, originally designed as a stool
| Product | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Side table on wheels | Stores and charges controllers behind sliding doors |
| Toolbox with laptop stand | Organizes cables and hardware |
| Gaming lounge chair | Stows controllers in a webbed under-seat pocket |
| Rollable TV stand | Holds up to 55-inch TVs with a split shelf for consoles |
| D-pad cushion | Green gaming-inspired cushion |
| D-pad controller platter | Tray converted from an original stool design |
| Thumbstick stool | Enlarged controller thumbstick for seating |
Johan Ejdemo, Ikea's head of design, removed the base from the original D-pad stool design and played with the seat, eventually deciding it would make a fine plate or tray, WIRED reported.
The Thumbstick Stool: A Star Is Born
The star of the Yxstaby collection is the thumbstick stool, according to WIRED. Ikea designer David Wahl, who queued all night 25 years ago to get his hands on the very first Xbox, persuaded the Xbox designers to hand over the controller's original 3D design files so he could manipulate them to iterate on different ideas.
“I was exploring keyboard chairs, but then it hit me: What is it that you're actually using when you're playing? The input devices,” Wahl said. “You have buttons and the control stick—and the control stick is moving. And, hey, it looks like a stool. What if you could enlarge it and actually sit on it?”
Wahl found that Ikea had been making a product for years that became the foundation of the thumbstick stool: an extending office stool with a rounded base called the Nilserik. “That's an Ikea classic, an old product, and I got inspired by the function of the Nilserik. What if we make something similar, but for gamers, and also update the design? That was the starting point.”
Design Engineering: Making a Grip Comfortable to Sit On
Even at an early prototype stage, the thumbstick stool proved to be a hit, WIRED reported. Wahl said at one workshop with the Xbox team, the console designers were instantly attached to the stool and wanted it in the collection.
“It was totally immediate,” Ledbetter confirmed. “It was hands down, ‘We just have to do it.’ And then it became not a question of if we should do it—how do we do it in a compelling way? What's the right scale? What are the ergonomics? Can it move and swivel around?”
It was not as simple as just sizing up the existing Xbox thumbstick to make the stool, Wahl explained. “The thumbstick is designed for maximum grip when you're controlling a game, but it's not really suitable to sit on. It's kind of aggressive and sharp. So the first task is to how to make this comfortable, and how to keep the same iconic shape. You have to see that this is a thumbstick, but you're sitting on it.”
WIRED reported that Ikea then began prototyping the stool in various materials and scales to balance comfort with the recognizable thumbstick silhouette. The result, like the rest of the Yxstaby line, represents a cross-industry collaboration where a consumer electronics platform's signature component became a furniture object—an example of how design teams can work directly with original 3D files to translate a familiar gaming input into a physical piece of home decor. For enterprise audiences, the underlying workflow—sharing native design files across company boundaries and iterating on them for a different physical context—mirrors the kind of cross-organizational digital handoffs increasingly used in product lifecycle management and manufacturing supply chains.
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