Ingvar Kamprad, the billionaire founder of the IKEA retail empire whose cheap, functional furniture is a feature of homes around the world, has died at the age of 91.

Born on March 30, 1926, in southern Sweden, Kamprad started by selling matches to neighbours at the age of five and soon expanded his range to include seeds, Christmas tree decorations, pencils and ball-point pens.

He founded IKEA in 1943 when he was just 17, but didn’t hit gold until 1956, when the company introduced flat-pack furniture.

The idea came to him as he watched an employee taking the legs off a table to fit it into a customer’s car and realised that saving space meant saving money.

Always looking to cut costs, Kamprad bought much of IKEA’s furniture from then communist Poland in the 1960s.

He eschewed formal business suits, dressed in well-worn clothes and in later years drove an old Volvo.

Kamprad turned a small-scale mail-order business into a global furniture empire. Photo: AAP

Outlining the IKEA philosophy in his “Testament of a furniture salesman” in 1976, Kamprad said wasting resources was “a mortal sin”.

Clever design and modest prices coupled with appealing styles quickly caught on and IKEA’s warehouse-like stores now sell everything from TVs to fitted kitchens.

Revenues were more than 38 billion euros ($59 billion) last year and the IKEA annual catalogue is said to be more widely read than the Bible.

Despite his success in building the IKEA business, Kamprad was a controversial figure.

He was forced to apologise for his time as a member of the New Swedish Movement, a nationalist, far-right group that supported fascist parties around Europe, in the 1940s.

His decision to live abroad, mainly in Switzerland, to avoid Sweden’s high income taxes was also widely criticised.

Kamprad returned to Sweden in 2014 after a reorganisation of IKEA’s complex ownership slashed his tax bill and left him with little formal influence.

– AAP