Gold Coast mum Kylie Hughes creates Stylkea stick-on panels to transform Ikea furniture

KYLIE Hughes has created a simple hack that can transform a $200 chest of Ikea drawers into a luxury piece of furniture.

Stylkea founder Kylie Hughes.

A GOLD Coast mum has created a simple “hack” to turn a $200 Ikea dresser into a luxury piece of furniture, for as little as $9.95.

Kylie Hughes, founder of online store Stylkea, sells stick-on fretwork panels to give homemakers “designer looks on a flatpack budget”.

“A few years ago my husband and I were working on a big reno for our home and I was spending literally hours and hours looking through magazines and design sites, trying to figure out how to get the same look on a budget,” she said.

“It’s hard not to be drawn back to Ikea, but I didn’t want my home looking like a clone of the Ikea catalogue. That’s [where the idea came from] for peel-and-stick panels, so the Ikea-ness disappears.”

The panels, designed with the help of Ms Hughes’ engineer husband to perfectly fit Ikea ranges including Malm, Kallax and Besta, aim to emulate the look of luxury furniture designers like Jonathan Adler, whose pieces can cost anywhere up to $5000.

The panels are designed to jazz up Ikea pieces.

Ms Hughes, who works as a copywriter, has been working on the idea for about 18 months and the website underwent a “very soft launch” in July. The panels start at $9.95 and go up to $34.95.

“It’a gaining traction now,” she said. “The panels are customised to perfectly fit, you literally just peel and stick them on, you don’t need any tools, and they come in a variety of different materials.”

Ms Hughes said she wanted to tap into the growing desire to “hack” common household items. “I think people are a bit tired of just being consumers, they want to be creative,” she said. “They want to get back into design and co-creation.”

While “everyone loves Ikea”, people want a designer look in their home. “Couple it with candles, floor coverings, affordable customisations, and you can literally get thousands of variations,” she said.