Ikea, the low-cost Swedish retailer that has furnished millions of homes around the globe, moved into the world of fine art with a Stockholm museum's retrospective of its 50 years of liveable design.

From the first flat-pack table in the 1950s to the latest trendy home styles, the exhibition now showing at the captial's contemporary art museum Liljevalchs Konsthall traces a half-century of history as seen through Ikea's eyes.

"This is not a conventional design exhibition. It's more an exhibition about how we live our lives," curator Steffan Bengtsson told AFP.

"This furniture is very close to people's experiences and lives, so in a way it's a nostalgic exhibition," he added.

A green armchair from 1959, a red sofa typical of the 1970s, and a lamp anno 1995 are just a few of the regular household items on display in the show that runs until August 13.

"People will recognise their own old furniture, from their teenage years, their homes, their family. And then I guess people will start to talk about their own lives, 'we had that table', 'Annie had that chair', 'by the way, what happened to Annie and Henry?'," he said.

Normally stocked in mammoth warehouses outside urban centres, the cheap'n'chic pieces of furniture are displayed here as legitimate artworks.