How a revolutionary idea became our go-to way of living.

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Spending a night at the hallowed Bauhaus school in Dessau, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, was my teenage dream come true. The walls of my childhood bedroom were plastered not with posters of pop stars, but with the furniture manufacturer Vitra’s wall chart of iconic 20th-century chairs. As a design geek, growing up in a house bedecked with Laura Ashley, I found the idea of the Bauhaus thrilling: each chair was a mini manifesto, embodying the world of stripped-back modern design that I might one day inhabit (I’m still waiting).

Yet, almost 20 years later, when I got to stay in Josef Albers’ former bedroom in the Bauhaus dormitory block, surrounded by chairs and lamps designed by the school’s various luminaries, it felt disappointingly like a sleepover in an Ikea showroom. There was a stack of four coloured nesting tables in one corner, of the kind readily available from Habitat for £95, but these were in fact Albers’ original version, designed in 1924, now reissued by the German manufacturer Klein & More – yours for £1,614 (from connox.co.uk). In another corner stood a simple bent tubular steel chair by Mart Stam, of the unremarkable sort you find in restaurants and meeting rooms around the world. There was a steel coat stand, too, which I thought betrayed the hand of Marcel Breuer – but which turned out to be from Ikea.