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>IKEA had done more to evolve the public taste than any other manufacturer. I have lived and worked around a fair chunk of the western world, establishing my l
by MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
>IKEA had done more to evolve the public taste than any other manufacturer.
I have lived and worked around a fair chunk of the western world, establishing my local headquarters each time, building myself a home.
Long, long ago, I gave up on IKEA for everything except cookware and meatballs.
The reason?
I grew rapidly tired with seeing my living room everywhere. Move across the US, get invited over for dinner with new colleagues: oh, that's my old couch. Cross Germany for personal reasons, stay at a friends place - yeah, that's the kitchen I had in LA. Couch-surfing for a few months in Tokyo? Right, you get the point, same coffee table.
It just became, impersonal. I get it, mass furniture, for the masses, has its time and place and economies.
But as I got older and traveled a lot more out of my own box, I saw the repetition.
These days I go to what remains of those ghastly furniture shops, or the second hand markets, or the good flea markets (which don't accept IKEA stuff) .. and do my best to assemble my living devices from older, antique things.
Its not so easy.
But, it does accomplish one thing: it's mine. I won't see this setup anywhere else in the world, again.
>For those of you who look down on IKEA furniture, I'd like to hear about what alternatives you think need mentioning.
One should not overlook the value in spending the IKEA budget on tools and instead rolling ones' own ...
- clickety_clack 2mo agoIKEA is fine when you’re just starting out, but after years, you realize that it’s got a shelf life. Good furniture really is better. You can get great stuff for very reasonable prices on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace, and it’s much more solid, durable and interesting than the cookiecutter ikea stuff.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoWhile helping friends move, as one does, I often challenge them to disassemble and reassemble their IKEA gear and still have it tight on the other side, so to speak, of the particle board .. Some do it with grace, some of us with a bit of duct tape. Others, not at all.
- manwe150 2mo agoI challenge you to dissemble your bespoke furniture and have it still usable after reassembly
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoIn fact I regularly do that with the tables and chairs which were built in a local factory here in Vienna in 1918, and they are rock solid.
- throwaway219450 2mo agoIt depends very much on the furniture, I think citation needed on exactly which items you’re talking about. Name and shame! The big wardrobes? They are the worst combination of impossibly heavy, awkward to disassemble and expensive to repurchase - best bet is to sell to the next occupant. On the other hand I have a solid table and chairs and they flat pack and reassemble perfectly. Same with bed frames. Shelving units go straight in the van. I wish the office desktops had metal threaded inserts for the legs instead of nylon, but otherwise also have moved several times and no real issue.
- p_j_w 2mo agoI’ve got a 10 year old Ikea bed that has passed this test twice now, even though I’ve lost some pieces.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2mo agoDefine “good”. I couldn’t justify the cost of the furniture I really want. So off to IKEA I go! And if you have a bit of skill at choosing and assembling IKEA furniture, then you can customise things on the cheap so at least it can look the way you want.
- pessimizer 2mo agoSome of it is very good, although you have to dig to find it. They use real wood in many pieces; it's not all disposable. I don't think that the good stuff is popular, though, and it certainly isn't highlighted. When a durable (often secretly classic) design slips in, it doesn't last more than a few years. The price is usually too high and it's usually too heavy (for their audience, not for me.) I've still got some really elementally designed and sturdy mounted shelves from them that I've carried from place to place, and installed and removed many times, for the past 30 years. They were probably discontinued 28 years ago; I couldn't find them in back catalogs and AI couldn't even help. I would have started to doubt that I got them from IKEA except that I have one set of components that is still in the packaging. It's simple steel and simple wood, and the wood (IKEA pretending like a plain flat wooden board is a product) is easily replaceable. I have to be honest, I don't really value furniture that is heavy for the sake of it. I like hippy-futons, simple wooden tables with drawers and removable legs, transformer chairs*, etc. Being able to be disassembled and easily moved or stored is something I value, and being able to be flattened against a wall so the room can be temporarily reconfigured (a requirement for colonial US furniture) is ideal (double drop-leaf tables are wonderful.) Wood and steel are durable, and simple designs with standard hardware are easily reparable. [*] https://www.core77.com/posts/58815/Different-Design-Approaches-to-the-Transforming-Library-Chair https://www.core77.com/posts/58815/Different-Design-Approach...
- msisk6 2mo agoFunny you should mention this. Just yesterday my wife and I went to the local Ikea to pick up some bookcases. I was originally just going to buy a bunch of the Billy bookcases; we have a few and know their limitations. But then I noticed they had a much better series called the Hemnes made with actual solid wood shelves and legs so you can route power cords and clean under them. Nice. So instead of a bunch of Billy's for $70 each I ended up with a bunch of Hemnes' for $350 each. We'll see if it's worth it when they get delivered tomorrow.
- bborud 2mo agoHemnes is a municipality in Norway. 10 minute drive from where I grew up.
- crooked-v 2mo agoI've got a bunch of BILLY bookcases that have survived several moves and are conveniently easy to mod with basic power tools. Sadly, I don't know if it's worth trying to keep them at this point, because they replaced the previously decently durable wood veneer surfaces with glued on wood-pattern paper wraps (https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/ikea-furniture-inflation-billy-c2f835bc https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/ikea-furniture-inflation...). It's lead to me having a mix of old ones that still look like the day I put them together and new ones where all the corners are already visibly raveling from the wear of a single move.
- dbdoug 2mo agoShelf life? I have items from Ikea that I have had for over 40 years, like Ivar shelving and Poang chairs. And they'll be handed down to my kids....
- theCodeStig 2mo agoThose are two of their products that are actually solid wood. No coincidence
- bborud 2mo agoWe're talking about the masses. Non-cookiecutter stuff costs more. Not everyone can afford to pay 5x or 10x what an IKEA product would cost.
- TheCondor 2mo agoIf it’s even available. I think most of America’s options are the big warehouse furniture places or an ikea if it near by, they do delivery well.
- bmitc 2mo agoI've had a lot of my Ikea furniture for over a decade. That includes a dining room table, several bookshelves, office table with glass top, coffee table, and several other things I've forgotten about, and we have some dressers that are years old as well. And several of these pieces have been involved in a move or two. Applying care and some wood glue during construction will yield a very solid product for years to come. And you have to have a little bit of taste and discretion when buying, as Ikea indeed has a wide range of quality among their items. Any item that has real wood will definitely last.
- wongarsu 2mo agoEven their honeycomb stuff can be surprisingly good. I have a Malm desk for over a decade, disassembled and reassembled twice for moving, and it's as good as new Sure, you could probably punch through the desk surface with a screwdriver. But within normal use it holds up great
- navane 2mo agoVery few tables wouldn't be ruined by punching it with a screw driver.
- llljk 2mo agoikea has solid wood furniture that'll last 10+ years no problem
- selfhoster1312 2mo agoYes, the problem is durability before Ikea was counted in centuries. Sure, this or that furniture may need to refit the hinges or refill the cushions every few decades, but your local handyman/handywoman would do it for cheap and the furniture would be well for some more decades. That, and apart from the tiny unfortunate period during which everything had to be leaded or mixed with uranium, your traditional furniture will degrade gracefully over time and not poison your entire family. Ikea-like (not just Ikea) furniture is already full of toxic chemicals.
- gbear605 2mo agoYou’re unfortunately vastly overrating the world before Ikea. I have the furniture passed down from the 70s and 80s and it’s all falling apart and made from plywood. You have to go back to the 30s and earlier before you get furniture that will stand up like that, and making that furniture new today would cost more than almost anyone could afford.
- selfhoster1312 2mo agoYou are correct, I used Ikea as a generic name for cheap plywood stuff. But there was still strong furniture being built in that era, it didn't all stop in the 1930s, if anything, because a portion of the population even in the global north had not converted to a "modern" post-WWII lifestyle as we see in the movies.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoAnd the only 30's - 60's furniture that survives will be mostly solid cabinets; they are neither in style (if you care) anymore, but more importantly they're no longer practical, as they were built for different lifestyles and - habits. Writing desks are cute in theory but nobody sits down to write letters anymore.
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoI wanted to move on from ikea furniture, but for TV furniture (tv, consoles, games, etc) there was just nothing out there besides either custom made furniture or ikea sets. I'm very happy with the latter, in the end.
- unsupp0rted 2mo agoI don’t understand this at all. Everybody has my phone and my AirPods, or a model close to them, and that’s fine. I don’t need my AirPods to have a monogamous relationship with me.
- pessimizer 2mo agoThis is in a thread about them having to be beautiful and modern. "Modernity" seems to boil down to actually being a bit afraid that your AirPods could have a near-monogamous relationship with you, and that this would mean that you're falling behind. Monotony and monoculture is not beautiful in some people's opinions. It seems that part of the definition of beauty is exception.
- engineer_22 2mo agoTo be truly fashionable, one must be /ahead/ of fashion
- llljk 2mo agoisn't that silly? unless you're building your furniture from scratch yourself, you're never ahead
- engineer_22 2mo agoExactly the point: fashion is /meant/ to be unobtainable.
- bborud 2mo agoI probably don't understand what "fashionable" means, but I've always suspected that in order to be fashionable you have to give up your dignity and, ironically, your individuality. It's like that (probably apocryphal) hipster story that was doing the rounds on the interwebs a few years ago. Angry with someone for having used an image of him to describe the stereotypical hipster. Only to then find out it wasn't a picture of him, he did look like the stereotype of a hipster and that there was nothing unique or individual about being like all the other affected "unique and individual". What a horrific idea: to expend effort to stand out just for the sake of standing out. How does one end up there without first having lost a big chunk of individuality?
- chaostheory 2mo agoEventually, even IKEA becomes “collectible” and not owned by many people. For example, I can no longer find my beloved (and inappropriately named) “Jerker” line of desks which are great for walking treadmills.
- emmelaich 2mo agoExactly. I've referred to Ikea as the MacDonald's of furniture. Which is a little harsh and I do own a few pieces.
- hattmall 2mo agoA lot of people have the exact opposite desires. There are millions of people who have the exact same things because they saw some influencer recommend it and they thought it was cool. I think it's probably the majority that want to have the same things as everyone else, very few people strive for uniqueness.
- selfhoster1312 2mo agoI don't think it's just a question of uniqueness. There's still distinct cultures across the planet, which affects architecture, furniture, kitchen equipment (and many other things). Some people might reasonably expect when traveling thousands of km to find different kitchen styles/utensils/recipes. Not everyone wants to be assimilated in a global tasteless culture. (see also, memes about how late-stage capitalism made everything bland and colorless, from cars to electronics)
- jitbit 2mo agoThis comment is (mostly) AI generated. Which is funny because it complains about the lack of originality
- fwn 2mo agoI see my style of thinking and writing everywhere in the world now. What happened? On a more serious note, and to tie the fun AI comment into the actual discussion: I suppose the types of medium through which people try to express themselves are just very diverse. One person makes a statement through their dinner table, another through their iPhone wallpaper, etc..
- jitbit 2mo agoNot when the convention is that theres supposed to be a real person on the other side. Example: a real musician decides to use AI to generate music (in full or partially) - their audience may still feel cheated.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoI assure you, I am quite human.
- ranguna 2mo agoSo am I, but AI still writes my code, not my comments.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoI thank you for the gracious compliment, that my writing style reminds of you of the technological marvel of modern machine learning, but I assure you the brogue and tempo were refined long before we had the bits at scale required to match the power of my mind.
- dolmen 2mo agoIt's still better to go to an AirBnB and get well known IKEA furniture than the cheaper/low quality/bad look things. But photos immediately reveal that.
- soco 2mo agoI'm not sure building their own furniture is an option for most of the people. I definitely won't do it, ew. Heck, even you aren't doing it, why even recommending it? Yes, flea markets are a budget friendly option, provided you can wait until something passable shows up, and you can arrange transport and putting it up.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoI have indeed built my own desk, my own shelving system, my own kitchen layout. You'd be surprised how easy it is to use a rotary or jig saw once you actually use one. Of course, one would not have to be so antiseptic about, you know, doing stuff... Oh, and, just for reference - middle Europe has tons of great second hand furniture opportunities, even still today, in all the major cities. Personal experience helps.
- xnx 2mo agoThis is like getting tired of bouquets because everyone has the same flowers.