One of the star furniture items in the apartment is the Vilbert chair Verner Panton designed for Ikea in 1993, which references the geometries de Cardenas plays with in projects like his OHWOW spaces. “That chair is evocative to me,” he says. “It’s four planes that come together in this star configuration, and it’s painfully simple, but it doesn’t look like any other chair I’ve seen before. That’s hard to do. Ryan in my office wanted to take it apart to see how it’s put together, and I was too scared.” De Cardenas hunted for the chairs for awhile, first seeing them in Sweden for 2000 Euros each and eventually purchasing two — complete with Ikea stickers on the bottom — from an eBay dealer for $600 total. He tried to contact Ikea to research the design, but no one he reached at the company seemed to know anything about it. “The chairs were a commercial failure at the time they were made. I have no idea if they’re actually valuable, but I feel like they will be one day.”