The complaints about ugliness are begging for a startup to come in and make a whole line of veneer panels and beams with various materials and finishes, a print

The complaints about ugliness are begging for a startup to come in and make a whole line of veneer panels and beams with various materials and finishes, a printing service that paints user uploaded images and patterns, and one-click order for hundreds of project kits. Saying grids can't be beautiful is just issuing a challenge to artists. And for people who like their power tools, it just doesn't seem like a big deal, but there is a whole segment of DIY that doesn't want a shop table, sawdust, blades and drills in their life. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of putting together premade kits - IKEA does that, just in a more disposable single-use fashion. The thing that I suspect most holds back the idea is in making it pencil out, because you'd most likely need a factory or retail outlet near the customer to overcome shipping heavy kits, and there's an inherent overengineering that comes with the modular approach that means that a grid beam bookcase isn't going to come in anywhere near the cost of an IKEA Billy.