Kieran Long, Icon's deputy editor, finds it ironic that pandemonium attended the opening of a store whose aesthetic is the very essence of Nordic calm and reasonableness. The subtext of every IKEA store around the world, he says, is: "'Look at us relaxed Scandinavians, we're so comfortable with all of our streamlined stuff. You're not. Get with it.'"
Naming the company as the most influential force in the world of design, Long says, was both "provocative and blindingly obvious." He agrees with Lupton that IKEA designs are uniquely successful at transcending barriers of class, culture and geography. But he's not sure the company is consciously fulfilling any sort of Modernist-utopian covenant in doing so.
(Courtesy Harry Allen)
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"The Bauhaus had a political agenda that IKEA doesn't," says Long. "IKEA is a big corporation. It's there to make money. It doesn't have a social program; it's not out to change the way that people live."
Consciously or not, however, IKEA has changed the way design is incorporated into the lives of middle-class urbanites (and suburbanites) around the world. By combining value with a global marketing and sales strategy, its products have achieved something like ubiquity.
Its fundamentally sturdy and attractive pieces are not only cheap but easy to modify -- making them irresistible to designers.
A past issue of Icon, Long says, featured an article about a group of Icelandic designers who have "worked out that it's actually cheaper for them to buy their basic plywood in the form of IKEA furniture. Because of its economy of scale, IKEA can make the finished products cheaper than [plywood] would cost in Iceland, where they don't really have a lot of trees. So these guys just buy the pieces and then alter or embroider them, or even smash them and remake them."
Paul Mackerer, a Pennsylvania-based interior designer with a sizable clientele in the Washington area, has been doing the same thing for years. "I use their tabletops exactly like panels of plywood," he says, "just cut it and do whatever I want to it. I'll make it into a headboard, or maybe make an entirely new table out of it."
For one client, Mackerer bought 55 small tabletops, cut and painted them, then covered an entire wall with them in an homage to parchment-panel walls by the legendary French interior designer Jean-Michel Frank. "They have a nice dimension," he says, "and in addition to being economical, they're easy to get. It's all just off the shelf -- I don't have to order it." For another client, he took an IKEA bed and matching dresser and covered it in an earthy bark paper to achieve a similar parchment effect.
Not everyone, of course, is so keen on IKEA. In his column for the Independent, Blacker described the mammoth stores as "hellish," and wondered "[h]ow many lives have been blighted by this organisation? How many marriages have foundered in its corridors or among the debris of a flat-pack item, scattered in despair across the floor of a kitchen?"
Speaking by telephone from London, Blacker said he can't fathom why people would be willing to risk injury -- or to injure others -- over wood-veneer furniture, however sleekly designed.
"I personally would argue that those people were not making a great style statement," he says of the rioters. "The idea that IKEA is bringing a level of sophistication to British consumers is slightly belied by the fact that they're stabbing each other at the entrance to the shop."
