What is it about IKEA? We all know that they sell self-assembly furniture and homeware at affordable prices, and that much of it is well-designed; I’m not sure what I’d do without their ‘Billy’ bookshelves. But it would be rather naive to cite that as the sole reason for their success. To put it another way, what makes a trip to IKEA different to any other big shop? Why that scene from Fight Club? Why IKEA Heights? Why do we love it so much?
I don’t exclude myself from the cult of IKEA. I always come back with a pocket full of those little pencils. I like looking through the knife-free cupboards and the remaindered Swedish-language novels on the shelves, wondering what impossible families could possibly occupy these rooms. They look like sets for a film that’ll never be made, so elegantly harmless they might be designed for a mental patient on parole; the modern equivalent of the padded cell. Yesterday I saw a middle-aged man in a suit seated behind a desk in a mocked-up office, chatting idly to a woman beside him, and he seemed so at ease in his surroundings I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he worked there or not. I like fantasising about secretly living in IKEA, like Charlie Chaplin lives in the department store in Modern Times, and having to survive off stolen meatballs, gravlax, and those nice little iced cakes. Then I’d be discovered by security and it would turn into the absurd shoot-out at the end of Mr and Mrs Smith — the confusing, Escher-esque architecture of their showrooms seems to invite senseless destruction as well as nurturing the nesting instinct. But I always leave tired and disappointed, annoyed by the crowds and by my own sense of failure to consume, drifting around on the same old low blood-sugar low that always follows long visits to museums and usually necessitates the purchase of a large bag of mini Daim bars.
‘Home is the most important place in the world’, says their latest advertising campaign. But if home were really the most important place in the world, then why would we go to IKEA? Of course, it doesn’t really mean your own home as it is now — it means an imagined utopian space, the future envisaged as a series of spacious rooms bathed in eternal daylight and furnished with a range of attractive and complementary objects. There is no hard sell here, only a dream of consistency and coherence at once beautiful and terrifying.
