Scandinavia Standard
In 1956, an IKEA employee named Gillis Lundgren was trying to fit a table into his car after a catalogue photo shoot, and it wouldn’t go in — so he removed the legs, laid them beside the tabletop, and by accident sparked the flat-pack furniture format that would eventually define the entire company
A man in a small town in southern Sweden, holding a leaf-shaped side table and a set of car keys, doing the mental math that anyone who has ever moved house knows too well.
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Iceland’s Blue Lagoon is the runoff pond of the Svartsengi geothermal plant, which began dumping hot brine on a lava field in 1976 expecting it to drain away, and the silica in the cooling water sealed the porous rock instead, caulking the basin of the country’s most visited attraction Scandinavia Standard
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