Is the IKEA Aesthetic Comfy or Creepy? On a recent Sunday, I woke up around 8 A. M. I had slept on a SULTANA HAGAVIK mattress. I smoothed the DVALA fitted sheet and tucked the HENNY CIRKEL quilt beneath four pillows sheathed in matching polka- dot cases. In the kitchen, some lettuce clung to the meniscus of a BLANDA BLANK salad bowl. In the living room, I sat down on the KIVIK sofa.
Because it is a few years old, its lines are leaner than those of current models, which have been expanded to accommodate the modern habit of perching a laptop on the armrest. KIVIK—along with a profusion of things I use every day—is made by IKEA, the Swedish home- furnishings company. IKEA has three hundred and twenty- six stores in thirty- eight countries.
In the fiscal year 2. IKEA calls itself the Life Improvement Store. The invisible designer of domestic life, it not only reflects but also molds, in its ubiquity, our routines and our attitudes. When IKEA stopped selling incandescent light bulbs, last year, six hundred and twenty- six million people became environmentalists. 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 marvelled 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! 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. The apartment I live in now is a rental in west London.
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Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts Read More.
Like many rentals here, it comes furnished—which means that, instead of your having to go to IKEA and get the stuff yourself, the landlord goes to IKEA and gets it for you. IKEA offers more than nine thousand products, divided into four “style groups”: Traditional, Scandinavian, Modern, and Popular. The person I live with had added to the mostly Modern infrastructure a few personal touches, for an effect one might call Itinerant Indifferent: a picture frame with no picture, various gifts from his mother, no knife that could penetrate meat. I put the picture frame in a drawer.
The knives I cared enough about to buy a decent set from a department store. In a paper called “On the IKEAnization of France,” a sociologist named Tod Hartman suggests that IKEA resolves the conundrum posed by Georges Perec in his 1. Les Choses,” about a young couple consumed with unhappiness at the discrepancy between the dismal home they have and the tasteful one they think they deserve.
We liked the SN. It cost fifty- nine pence, which makes it what IKEA calls a “breathtaking item”—so affordable that you can’t afford not to buy it. We took two. IKEA offers the serendipity of the yard sale without the mothballs. Bill Moggridge, the director of the Cooper- Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York, calls IKEA’s aesthetic “global functional minimalism.” He said, “It’s modernist, and it’s very neutral in order to avoid local preferences, to get the economies of scale they need in order to keep the prices good.” IKEA products are intended to work as well in Riyadh as they do in Reykjav. IKEA sells a few products (water fountains, chopsticks, mosquito nets) tailored to a Chinese clientele, but ninety- five per cent of the product range is standard. It is said that one in ten Europeans is conceived in an IKEA bed.
Lauren Collins on the world of IKEA. Mystery, fantasy, fiction, and non-fiction recommendations, with brief plot synopses. The 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday night, September 22, 2016 at the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. 1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul.
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People have cared intensely about the decoration of their houses since cavemen began painting on walls. We are attached to our belongings because they are vessels for our memories and for our aspirations. Freud wrote to Martha, his future wife, during their engagement: Tables and chairs, beds, mirrors, a clock to remind the happy couple of the passage of time, an armchair for an hour’s pleasant daydreaming, carpets to help the housewife keep the floors clean, linen tied with pretty ribbons in the cupboard and dresses of the latest fashion and hats with artificial flowers, pictures on the wall, glasses for everyday and others for wine and festive occasions.
Are we to hang our hearts on such little things? Yes, and without hesitation. Our curio cabinets and chesterfield sofas are the backdrops of domesticity, forming the unchanging indoor landscape—mahogany mountains, meadows of chintz—against which we go about life. Choosing a piece of furniture was once a serious decision, because of the expectation that it was permanent. It is said that Americans keep sofas longer than they keep cars, and change dining- room tables about as often as they trade spouses.
IKEA has made interiors ephemeral. Its furniture is placeholder furniture, the prelude to an always imminent upgrade. It works until it breaks, or until its owners break up. It carries no traces. Courtesy IKEACourtesy IKEAIKEA stores, like Chihuahuas and cilantro, provoke extreme reactions. Some people, such as the members of the “Official IKEA Is Hell on Earth” Facebook group, can’t stand them.
Others treat IKEA as a human- size doll house, hanging around its prettily furnished rooms just for entertainment. In recent months, middle- aged singles have taken to congregating in a Shanghai IKEA in such numbers that management has been forced to cordon off a designated “match- making corner.” Shen Jinhua, an IKEA employee, told the Shanghai Daily, “Before we set up an isolated area for them, they occupied the seats in the dining area for a long time, and thus other guests could not find a seat.”Each IKEA store is carefully laid out to stimulate certain behaviors. Johan Stenebo, who worked at IKEA for twenty years, writes in “The Truth About IKEA” (2. One could describe it as if IKEA grabs you by the hand and consciously guides you through the store in order to make you buy as much as possible.” In June, I visited IKEA’s new store in Hyllie, a suburb of the Swedish city of Malm. The store, which opened in September, 2. IKEA’s “everyday best practice” store. Martin Albrecht, the store’s manager, agreed to give me a tour of the premises.
Albrecht explained that a customer, wherever he is, should always be able to see the next bin of bags. We were standing on the gray path that guides customers through an IKEA store. A path that is straight for any longer than that is called an Autobahn—a big, boring mistake. Those customers who would like to veer off the IKEA- approved route often cannot find the exit.
IKEA stores have secret doors, like those in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”: one can step through them and go directly from Living Rooms (which an IKEA store always starts with) to Children’s Rooms (“Cots are our ticket to building a lifelong relationship with our core customers,” according to an internal report) without having to look at two hundred bath mats on the way. But the hidden portals are almost impossible to find: if sticky eyeballs are the metric of success on the Internet, then IKEA rules sticky feet. Alan Penn, a professor of architectural and urban computing at University College London, conducted a study of the IKEA labyrinth and deemed it sadomasochistic. The only comparably vast shopping environment he could think of, he told the London Times, was the Bazaar of Isfahan, a seventeenth- century Persian marketplace. Albrecht, an affably earnest man in a blue- and- yellow polo shirt, led the way past several room sets. In the IKEA catalogue, the rooms are always perfectly done, but in stores the quality of their execution varies.
Design experts love IKEA’s products but consider going to retrieve them a necessary evil. Maxwell Gillingham- Ryan, a co- founder of the blog Apartment Therapy, praised IKEA for “the inventiveness of their designs” and “the usability of their furniture,” but, he added, “A brand- new IKEA store that’s fully stocked can be a happy place, but one that’s been trampled by the crowds on a Saturday is an ugly place to be.”At the Malm.
They change the slipcovers once a week. They cut wicks on candles and dust fake computer screens. They make sure that all the price tags aim to the left. Albrecht indicated a box of green fleece blankets, meant to complement a couch on display. Add- ons are not the only way that IKEA encourages what it refers to, internally, as “unplanned purchasing.” When we reached the Market Hall section of the store, where IKEA sells pots, pans, and other lightweight items, Albrecht declared, “Now it’s the famous Open the Wallet section.” There, an abundance of cheap goods—flowerpots, slippers, lint rollers—encourages the customer to make a purchase, any purchase, the thinking being that IKEA shoppers buy either nothing or a lot. There is art in the visual merchandising, too. Albrecht showed me how IKEA uses a technique called “bulla bulla,” in which a bunch of items are purposely jumbled in bins, to create the impression of volume and, therefore, inexpensiveness.
IKEA constitutes a sort of borderless nation- state, with seats of power, redoubts of conservatism, second cities, imperial outposts, creative hubs, and administrative backwaters.
German Enigma Machine Found at Flea Market Fetches $5. Auction. A professor of cryptology has auctioned off a rare and fully- functional Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt messages during the Second World War. Incredibly, the collector found the machine at a flea market in Bucharest—which suggests Romania may house other machines still waiting to be discovered.
As reported in Deutsche Welle, the unnamed collector knew what he had stumbled upon at the flea market, and cooly snatched it up for 1. He then put it up for sale at the city’s Artmark auction house with a starting bid of 9,0.
On Tuesday, the rare cryptographic machine sold to an unnamed online bidder for 4. A very healthy return on investment, to be sure. Enigma machines were invented by the Germans in the 1. Second World War. Romania was allied to Nazi Germany at the time, so it makes sense that the unit was found in the Balkan country. Famously, the breaking of the Enigma system by computer scientist Alan Turing at Bletchley park (with prior help from Polish spies and scientists) contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII.
The unit which sold on Tuesday is in pristine condition and it’s still useable. An Enigma 1, it was produced in Berlin by Heimsoeth & Rinke in 1. Around 2. 0,0. 00 Enigma machines of various types were manufactured in the 1. Around 5. 0 Enigma machines of various sorts are currently on display at museums around the world, with many more in the hands of private collectors. In 2. 01. 5, an even rarer Enigma M4 machine sold at auction for a record $3. The M4, named for its four rotors (the Enigma 1 has three rotors), was manufactured during the latter stages of the war. Only 1. 50 remain from the 1,5.