We made a trip to the local IKEA this past weekend. The furniture store of college dorm rooms, IKEA was a staple of my 20s as I moved between apartments and condos, and evolved living arrangements from roommates to living solo to moving in with my then-girlfriend/now-wife. Since then, we have moved on to sturdier furnishing manufacturers for home decor—same mid-modern minimalist vibes, but better and more choices in materials1. But, we promised the kids would be getting their own rooms this summer, and they have outgrown the furniture they’ve been using since COVID2. As my kids remain startlingly destructive, Ikea still strikes the right balance of cost, design, and utility.
It’s been a few years since I’ve taken in the full shopping experience at IKEA, and…it’s about the same as it has ever been. They shut down the childcare play area; I’m guessing a combination of liability and COVID-induced restrictions killed the amenity. The showrooms still feature designs that have kids climbing onto whatever surfaces they can reach, and each purchasable item has a tag that references an aisle and bin number in the warehouse below. The restaurant still serves meatballs by the plate, while the snack bar by checkout3 offering soft serve ice cream en route to exiting via the cavernous garage. The purchasing ground floor remains a maze, though the shortcut signs are more prominent than I remember them as a teenager—probably more indicative of me not paying attention to my surroundings.
IKEA furniture is simple, yet it features a timeless design that enables the company to mass-produce its inventory. Some of its products have been around so long that they’ve reached legendary status: I’ve been buying KALLAX shelves and BILLY bookcases for as long as I can remember, and this trip was no exception. The kids needed more storage space for their collectibles, and so we hauled a couple of BILLYs back home, for assembly the following day.
The BILLY bookcase is a modern marvel of industrial design and manufacturing. Yes, it’s a set of MDF boards held together at right angles with wood dowels and extruding screws, with a handful of shelves and shelving pins. It is such a simple and unassuming piece of functional furniture that virtually every furniture store stocks some version of the same design, with outward differences mainly visible in colors and the materials used. High-end variants add a few drawers or cupboards for flair, but the BILLY line has started to branch out in response, with more modular components available to mix and match from the basic bookcase.
But the IKEA industrial design and manufacturing and packaging teams have not stopped iterating and tweaking their products. In this case, they added a small cutout for baseboard moulding, a decorative feature commonly found in North American homes, so that the bookcase can lean flush against the wall. They added cutouts for anchor points, so it’s easier to install and well-hidden within its innards. The pins that hold up the shelves are now L-shaped and drive into the bottom of the board itself, a novel design that keeps the shelf completely stable—more so than any other pin type I’ve used with other bookshelves, including older versions of the BILLY.
And the packaging continues to optimize for space, while the steps for construction are designed with consumer-level ergonomics in mind. They’ve simplified and consolidated a lot of the different screw and stud parts into a handful of key variations, and provide instructions that are as dummy-proof as you’d find in furniture assembly. The famous IKEA effect—the cognitive bias towards things built or made by their owners—is still valid over a decade and a half later; it’s just a bit easier to experience it with their continuously refined products.
So all of this is to say that I’ve renewed my appreciation for IKEA. As a kid, I liked the visual design of their furniture. But, the simple and minimalist design aesthetic is nowadays commonplace, and other furniture manufacturers execute similar styles with better materials and finer details. Rather, in revisiting the IKEA store and putting together their contemporary products, I’m more impressed with their technical and mechanical engineering, the assembly design and how all the components fit complementarily.
Now the kids want to pick their desks.
Recent favorites are Article for contemporary stylings, and SOBU in nearby Berkeley for a little more flair and to support local business.↩
When I panic-bought desks and chairs so the kids could have a remote-learning setup.↩
Okay, one notable change here is that they have a lot of self-checkout lines now.↩
