“Is the IKEA ethos comfy or creepy?”
“The prevalence of IKEA in my apartment is more the result of circumstance than of desire or discernment. Since graduating from college, nine years ago, I have moved eight times, propelled by the usual vicissitudes of money, romance, and work. My first encounter with IKEA was in the freshman-year dormitory, where I marveled at the profligacy of classmates who, that September, and each one thereafter, ordered a new couch from IKEA— and paid the ninety-nine-dollar delivery fee! (My roommates and I settled for a hand-me-down, which was covered with a sleeping bag and doused in Febreeze). By the time I was a senior, I had my own room and had acquired my first piece of IKEA furniture, an only slightly shopworn navy-blue love seat. A shared apartment in Manhattan followed. It suffered from a plight that IKEA has acknowledged in an internal report titled “Life in Rental Accommodation”: the tragedy of the common room is that it often is a dump. There were several apartments in the West Village, and one, farther south, in which my parents and I spent a long night trying to assemble an IKEA bookshelf with the guidance of only a stick man with a mute smirk. IKEA omits words from instruction booklets, because words make instruction booklets thicker, which makes them more expensive. The screws strip easily. Amy Poehler once said that IKEA is Swedish for “argument.” In Tribeca, I pridefully refused IKEA, like a child announcing that she no longer plays with dolls. IKEA can also be Swedish for feeling like you’re never going to grow up.”
Read Lauren Collins’ Full New Yorker Article Here.
