I don't buy much IKEA furniture, very little of it survives even a single move, and for the price you can find plenty of furniture that does. So it ends up not being a great investment, except for a few very specific, highly optimized pieces.
I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant desk and a Billy bookshelf for each employee. Two Galants turn into a reasonable conference table. The employees loved both, a simple sturdy desk that doesn't dictate function and a highly customizable wall, they quickly became filled with all kinds of personalization. Cost per employee? something like $250.
They lasted for years and when the startup finally sold and closed up, the new owners didn't want the furniture, so we asked around and found a battered women's shelter who had just placed a woman and three kids into an apartment. They had been living without any furniture at all. Suddenly our reception couch turned into a living room couch, our Galants turned into their dining room table and our extra chairs turned into their dining room tables. Desk lamps became living room lamps and torches lit the bedrooms. Billys became impromptu wardrobes in all the bedrooms. After the move, all they needed were some mattresses, but they at least had an apartment full of other furniture. But I came away impressed at the general versatility of the furniture. Nearly a decade later, that family still has their Billys.
Billys basically get out of the way and turn into walls with storage. I've never bought the accessories (doors, etc.), but all the ones I know turn into curio cabinets as much as bookshelves. Nobody really cares much about what shelves look like, they care about what's on them and in that sense IKEA nailed it.
I also have a handful of other shelves from various manufacturers and it's very weird how they get things wrong and how optimized a piece of furniture the Billy is. It's weird to get so passionate about such a plain looking piece of furniture, but it's really kind of perfection of form.
Your first paragraph seems to contradict the rest of your story.
It's absolutely true that some IKEA stuff is very low quality. Like the Billy: the shelves of the wide Billy sag when you put too many books on them. But IKEA also has higher quality furniture from solid wood. More expensive of course, but also sturdier. They're designing for various quality/price points.
I once had a really sturdy IKEA desk, either Galant or its predecessor. It was strong enough to stand on with two people. Unfortunately its successor sagged with a single person leaning against it. I loved that desk, but my wife didn't like it and felt it was too big.
My main problem with IKEA is that their beds are only 2 meters long. They've got really comfortable and affordable mattresses that my wife loves, but due to my height we have to shop for more expensive brands (which are supposed to be better and more comfortable, but turn out not to be).
Parent mentioned at the end of the first paragraph that there were a couple products from IKEA that didn't fit his overall feelings about their quality, he then went on for the rest of his post to talk about those couple of stand out amazingly designed/built products.
The Galant desks are not sturdy. I would not dare to stand on one. First of all, if you use the telescoping legs, the locking mechanism is plastic IIRC and can't take a lot of load. But even just the actual desk surface: I think it's a sandwich of paper honeycomb with a very thin veneer and bends a lot even when someone's just sitting on it. It would probably just break in half if you stood on it.
While I fully expect my current (non-Ikea) desk would support my weight if I sat or stood on it, I've never actually considered doing that. Is sitting/standing on desks a common activity? My desk just supports my laptop and an external monitor.
At least at home, if I have to do something to my curtain rod or put up christmas lights to the window etc, I find it perfectly normal. At work you're not expected to do those things. But I most definitely wouldn't call a desk that can't take standing "sturdy".
Ikea has lowered the standards expected from furniture a lot, though it's been in decline with formaldehyde chipboard etc since the fifties or so anyway.
Are there used furniture online communities (craigslist, facebook groups), stores, auctions or recycling centers where you live?
Where I'm at, things like a certain brand's bookshelves can be bought and sold relatively easily, because they're common, strong, practically forever and modular so can be customized to almost anything. They also have a timeless look.
It's everything Ikea is not. Even most of the solid wood Ikea stuff uses is just weak and soft.
Having said that, most new unpainted wood furniture here (not just Ikea) looks terrible because it's filled with knots. That's because of local forestry policy decisions, good quality forests and wood has been destroyed, and the country has been driven to producing low value pulp.
By the way, efficient aftermarkets exist for other things as well, for example musical instruments, because they also don't wear out so much in amateur use, or at least the wearing parts should be replaceable.
It brings satisfaction to me to use, own, buy or sell a good product that is designed and manufactured to last.
Try Crate and Barrel, I've always felt it is just Ikea at a higher price + quality. I suspect the price increase is greater than the increase in quality though.
The designs from Crate and Barrel usually aren't as good as those Ikea, even if the quality is up to snuff. CB2 is usually okay, as long as they haven't decided to make the piece you want only available in bright orange or something. They do that sometimes.
There is definitely a gulf between Ikea (bad quality, good design, $) and DWR-tier places (good quality, good design, $$$$). Muji maybe, if they happen to make something in the niche you're looking for.
I love the irony of naming yourself "Design Within Reach", while still being out of reach for most people who aren't professionals.
As the owner of several Muji items (trash cans, silverware holders, rolling storage unit, coasters, dish rack), I have to say while they look nice, they're rarely as well thought-out as Ikea. The trash cans don't seal, and the dish rack can't actually hold plates upright in position.
I can't praise enough the quality and functionality of Joseph Joseph items. It seems like everything I own from them meets the advertised functionality and then some. And while expensive, the prices are fair. Great plastics and finishing.
seems like the way ikea classifies their furniture is merely a suggestion. for example i've always used their dining tables as desks, as their "desks" are too small and flimsy and relatively expensive.
There's a disconnect when I look at the price of good furniture compared to products that are insanely more complicated (laptops, smartphones), heavier than furniture (motorbikes, snowblowers, lawnmowers), as bulky as flatpack bookcases (big screen TVs), and need to be shipped even greater distances than furniture (all my examples would be coming to the U.S. from Asia).
Furthermore, furniture has much less regulation than electronics and motorized things (so it should be cheaper), furniture needs much less capital (a new TV manufacturing facility would cost hundreds of millions of dollars), and designing a new piece of furniture needs a tiny fraction of the engineers and programmers that any new laptop, TV, or smartphone would require.
I think that good furniture in general is still grossly expensive and I don't understand where the money is going.
EDIT: I have an example: I have a Sharp 60-inch TV, bought in 2011 for $1319.99, and weighs 92.6 pounds or 42 kg according to the spec sheet. I also have a dining room table bought the same year for ~$1200 and which weighs less than the TV. Considering that the TV is literally a million times more complicated than the table and that the raw materials of the TV (sand->silicon->ICs, petroleum->plastics) have undergone vastly greater transformation than a table (wood, glue, iron->nails), why isn't the TV much more expensive or the table much cheaper? Both are commodities and both are made on assembly lines.
Pretty much all the answers below you are wrong :)
The real reason is simply that nobody wants it.
The machinery/etc exists to make it completely trivial to productionize semi-custom and completely custom furniture, out of high quality wood.
From 5-axis CNC to multi-angle boring machines to what have you.
Heck, with the copy of alphacam i have, i could program pretty much most of a factory.
(and it doesn't need to acclimate, it's kiln dried. You just keep your factory at the same humidity as the climate it's going to. Even then, most of the issues you hit are around finishing and solvable).
Your biggest underlying problem, again, contrary to the comments, is actually that real high quality lumber is not a sheet good.
For for tops/etc, you have to spend the machining time to make it one (IE automatically plane/cut/join, then machine).
Sure.
Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have:
Tables, cabinets, chairs.
It's the same story with all of them.
Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about.
Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years)
Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't.
People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for.
Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it?
The answer is "nothing" :)
Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do.
It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color.
But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can.
It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW.
Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC.
But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc.
Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look.
So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets".
Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up.
That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second.
Tables.
Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced.
I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years)
But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices.
Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction.
You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do)
But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it.
So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it?
and that's precisely what happens!
Chairs are the same.
In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of.
So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose)
This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality.
Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price.
This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end.
In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now:
quality: 1-3
price: 1-6
quality: 4-9
price: 7-8
quality: 10
price: 9-10
As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.
Strong agreement. For specific examples, read the history of Stanley Tools or Craftsman. Compare that to the rise of Harbor Freight and the stories the old timers will tell you about Taiwanese tools from about 1975.
My only argument -- real CNC is still north of 100k, it just happens to be worth running because of the production speed increases. The reason you don't CNC furniture like IKEA is that you get more production in less time by using custom built machines that produce specific sizes and shapes in volume. The real reason that IKEA employs the number of engineers it does is so that they can optimize production -- reuse this shape or this part in eleven designs instead of ten and you save the company two machines valued at $X million and you save Y meters of production facility floor space valued at $Z/m^2.
This is a great real-world example of the Nobel Prize winning concept, The Market for Lemons. [0]
A buyer wants to spend somewhere between price 4-6, but they aren't able to tell quality 3 from quality 7. Due to fear of getting taken advantage of, they end up settling for low quality at low price. Sellers react to this behavior, and we get the price/quality distortions described above.
This quality/price curve you describe seems to come about naturally now in our world of mass-produced things. Cameras, Furniture, housing construction, appliances, cars, etc. It's straightforward to find 'crappy', and 'nicer crappy', it's reasonable to find 'truly premium', and it's very difficult to find 'solid, but not quite premium'.
There is definitely a hollowing out of the middle ground, and I think you are correct in that much of it comes from a lack of informed customer base. Only a fleeting few are willing to educate themselves to recognize the difference between 'nicer crappy' and 'solid' even if in a well-informed market they should be about the same price.
Thanks for your writeup, I'm really getting sick of the cheap stuff that is out there. IKEA has served it's purpose for me, and to be honest a bunch of pieces have survived multiple moves but they are now usually stuck in closets or in my kid's rooms.
Anyway I'm rambling on because I'm curious if there are any decent places to buy furniture nowadays, a good table for instance? I feel like when I got dragged around looking for a dining room table to Ashley's and Bob's and whatever other chain store they are all selling the same crap, just at slightly different prices. I'm honestly thinking I would rather build my own table than buy something made out of particle board with laminate on it.
I has similar experiences with Ashley and Bobs. The Farmhouse Store is decent. They ship their orders out to Amish country (or so they say), which is also a good resource. But its solid wood and some hint of craftsmanship. (I've heard Restoration Hardware also, but can't confirm directly.)
I've been through a house fire and needed to replace furniture in most rooms over the past year or so. What I've learned is to pick and choose for quality. Family dining table to last until we move out of the house, where we're going to congregate daily for laughs, tears, homework, meals, holidays? High-quality for this family. Bookcase? Kids furniture? Cheaper the better (Sauder, Ikea) and anchor them to the wall - they're going to get beat up and are potential safety issues.
(edit) Oh, Estate Sales might be the only way to get out of that scale that Danny Bee is speaking of. Get some old furniture, and tweak it to your style (assuming thats enjoyable work to you). Just dont assume if it was made in 1960 there won't be some laminated wood veneer.
Buy vintage from Craigslist, AptDeco, estate sales, etc. The stuff that's lasted is usually of good quality, and even high-end/designer vintage that will last a lifetime can cost less than buying new cheaply made furniture from chain stores.
The only exceptions for me are couches (nobody figured out how to make a comfortable couch until c.1980) and mattresses.
Wood is remarkably expensive. Especially cabinet-grade wood that's free from knots. Even more so if you want sustainable hardwood. I've costed up doing my own furniture and it's far more expensive than IKEA even if you count your own labour as free.
It's the economy of scale; complexity is mostly a one time upfront cost. Once you've figured out how to efficiently make a hundred TVs at a time, you know how to make a million.
For a TV most of the materials and components are either plastic (and thus light and cheap) or generic silica based stuff that is produced in batches of millions at a time (electronic components) in the blink of an eye. The most expensive parts of a TV are probably its screen (complexity) and the copper wiring (cost of material).
With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour, and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table. Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs). Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs).
Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables.
"With a wood table the production of all parts takes much more labour"
No, they don't.
Really.
This is a pretty trivial application of CNC.
I CNC table legs on my simple one, and have designed much larger CNC automations for local shops that CNC them.
The people who are doing it at factory scale would find this utterly trivial.
" and high quality wood furniture is usually made of parts that have exact measurements and specifications for that particular model of table."
This doesn't mean anything to the robots.
Really.
They just don't care.
They are already automatically referencing and aligning things to get them square.
They use lasers or other sensors plus vacuum to automatically align it to alignment pins within 0.001".
Just not a big deal.
"Wood is also a live material; no two pieces are alike (this holds true from the unprocessed logs to the finished table legs)."
Again, sorry. I pay my supplier for 90% red cherry. I could pay him for 100% red cherry.
If you think i can't make a computer grain match stuff, etc, i don't know what to tell you. more automated cnc cabinet shops do it all day long.
" Lumber also needs time to acclimatize, so the whole resources to product cycle takes a lot longer (increasing storage costs)."
No, it doesn't, it's kiln dried, and the only thing that matters is the climate it's going to.
For what is being done to it (making a table), it doesn't matter since the top will be floating anyway.
"Also, unless you are Ikea, a globally operating corporation can sell a lot more TVs than dining tables.
"
This is literally the only reason: People don't want it compared to the ikea furniture. They don't care, and aren't or can't pay a premium.
Lots of global companies make TVs (LG, Samsung, Philips, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, ...) but it seems that "there are no real Ikea competitors in the world, period."[1]
So why aren't there more globally operating corporations selling furniture?
Could there be an opportunity for a higher-end (better than Ikea) highly-automated global furniture maker to take away market from thousands of small local furniture makers all over the world?
Perhaps a combination of much more variation in both models and regional tastes. TVs get replaced a lot faster than good quality dining tables too. Come to think of it, there really isn't that much of a variety in choice of TVs (a few sizes, perhaps a curved screen or not) compared to dining tables — the latter are much more personal in taste.
hell the manual production requirements are pretty much shown to be a non issue in the linked article. making a book shelf is little different from a table and a set of machines could just churn them out.
the difference is variety. variety means no single product is a very large seller which can defeat economies of scale. the bookshelf in the article is generic and can be done on the cheap. Other furniture items tend to have more variety
It's just scale. Only a really really good designer can make furniture good enough to look and function better than mass produced. It takes time and their production runs are typically limited to at most double digits a year. These people will not work for a pittance and being intelligent and motivated would move on to other work if they can't earn well. All this conspires to make a market where few people are good enough, can earn enough and find the few clients that can afford it.
I love my billy shelves. I also have a dining table that cost 4 figures that I'll have for life and is unlikely to be seen in another house so it lends my home a personal touch. Which humans like :)
You chose to pay that much for the table. There are cheaper tables. You can get one for less than $100 if you want. But those probably don't meet your standards, and this one does.
Similarly, there are TVs that are much more expensive, but you decided to go for this one.
Wait until you see art... There is no regulation, it comes with probably no return policy. It requires one person to do -- art doesn't need capital to start at all. Yet art is insanely expensive. Do you rather be a programmer, an engineer, a fashion designer, a woodworker, or an artist? I don't have a good answer for your question, but I think the idea here is everyone needs a living.
Also, you don't need to purchase a new bookcase every year like you do with, say, your smartphone.
That's not true. There are a billion people putting their art on the Internet every day: DeviantArt, Pinterest, Flickr, Shutterfly, and other sites with fan fiction, manuscripts of books, cartoons, millions of homemade videos, music sites. The average price of all of this art is zero. Only a very tiny fraction of people make money with art.
First, saying art is cheap because billions pieces of art on Deviant Art are free is like saying code is cheap because billions of lines of code published every day on GitHub are free. Average you pay for code is zero, by that logic?
Second, the Internet can only host a very specific kind of art (digitalized) that is a very tiny fraction of art that you can experience in a museum or an exhibition. Where is my paint oil on canvas with the beautiful texture and smell I could experience on DeviantArt?
You have to count what you have to pay for an artist/coder to make what you want, not what they want. Then we are talking about the same thing.
There's a lot of terrible stuff on DeviantArt. But there's also a lot of great stuff on there too I've seen.
And then there's the stuff that combines both; beautifully rendered, highly detailed work that tells an interesting story in one image, that's also ultimately "just" fan-art for Rick and Morty. Humans are weird sometimes.
I don't think so... I think we are being spoiled by the vast amounts of. I am one of the generations who had formative experiences before internet, and I would have been completely transfixed by the stuff on say, deviantart. I could look at weird stuff in the library for hours sometimes, and half of that was not very good at all.
You'd be surprised how cheaply art students at your local college would be willing to recreate pieces for you. These people are already quite skilled by their 20s and it's no problem for them to make a copy of a piece. Their original pieces made for class can be found for next-to-nothing.
Second-hand shops are full of wonderful pieces for cheap.
Photographs and digital art are extremely cheap to print and frame. My local UPS store will do huge prints for a few bucks.
Mass produced art, like that from Ikea, is usually less than $40 a piece, a lot of it is less than $10. Homegoods and Hobby Lobby is another good place to shop for cheap mass-produced pieces.
You can do-it-yourself for the costs of materials. You don't need much skill to toss some colors onto a canvas.
Art can be cheap and it can be found everywhere. It doesn't need to be some hand-painted master piece. A printed picture or photograph in a frame will work just fine. Or a simple vase with some flowers.
A while ago, a coworker was excited to move to another flat but there was a little something that was going to be complicated: books. He and his girlfriend were both avid readers and their two already impressive collections fused years ago into a massive beast. As we were discussing the "problem", I asked him for a ballpark estimation of the number of books to move, expecting something like "1000 books", but he replied after a couple seconds with "about 12 or 15 Billies".
One thing I lament after switching to ebooks is the lack of books. Sounds silly, but I think a wall with shelves of books was quite nice looking and colorful.
I am happy to not have to store books in physical form. They are heavy, take up loads and loads of space, and do not keep well. And that's not even getting into how impractical they are to actually read (or search) compared with e-books.
And still, something is missing in the home. A book collection might be the most personal touch a person can have in the home. Some of it is vanity, you want to show people what you read, but somehow it is also delightful to casually look over all the old gems and sometimes get the urge to pick one out to read again. This doesn't really happen in the same way with the Kindle. I guess it's the same with record collections vs. digital distribution.
A bookshelf is like a hash-table to memories of the books you've read. A quick glance at a given binding can bring up lots of thoughts... or it could be a dead reference if the book was crap. :)
My wife is an avid book collector, we we are both avid nomads. In the four years we've been together, we've lived in six places. Most of her books have not survived the repeated moves, with boxing, unboxing, storing, trips in trucks or trailers, etc. She's lost a lot of her physical books, most of which were paperbacks.
We've since condensed to only keeping hardcovers. Anything we would have bought as a paperback is now an ebook or is donated when we're done reading it. Our bookshelves only contain hardcovers, which looks a lot nicer and travels better too.
- require an external light source
- forget the current page when closed
- no search feature
- highlights require an additional implement and are hard to erase
I recently culled my book collection to those I truly cherish (around 50 or so). Nowadays, I only buy physical books from my favorite authors which I am sure will be exceptional and worth re-reading. Whenever I feel my book collection is getting too big for their shelf, I cull again. It allows me to keep some books around, but prevents my space from getting cluttered!
One of the things I like about ebooks is the lack of books; when I was just out of college, I had to stop buying books for a couple years because I didn't have any room to store them!
I'll buy books again when I'm in a long term living situation (i.e. not renting), and can fill walls with bookshelves.
I don't understand if the article is talking about a specific one or the whole product line, and what makes one or the other special. I don't see anything notable, other than the impressive simplicity and packing innovation that applies to Ikea products in general.
There's nothing notable with that bookshelf except the price. That model has simply been the most basic/cheap bookcase at IKEA (and elsewhere) for decades, a must have for young adults moving out of their parents'. I still have two after many years.
Incidentally, I'm getting that very same KALLAX you linked to in a couple of weeks as a room separator.
I'm still nowhere near that, but I've taken to count my books in linear meters (currently ~15). They're mostly stored in kallax (formerly expedit) bits and three kallax cells is a metre, so that's convenient.
(incidentally, a billy is 80cm wide and 6 shelves high, so each billy is close to 5 linear metres, which means your friends have 60~70m worth of books)
60-70 m of books, assuming he uses only one layer in Billy. I have two, and occasionally three (though it's not Billy but another higher-quality shelf maker Lundea).
True, I assumed single-layer as billy isn't open-backed and I prefer seeing all my books. Also billy seems a bit short for two layers to be comfortable and not risk damaging books, even with small-ish paperbacks.
The exact number of Billies may have been a bit different but the discussion quickly shifted to the ubiquity of the Billy and what it said about the global economy and how easily we adopt custom standards.
I remember being surprised by that new unit but also astonished by the fact that I instinctively understood what he meant.
> Ingvar Kamprad "is said to fly economy and drive an old Volvo. This frugality may help to explain why he is the world's eighth-richest man - although the four decades he spent living in Switzerland to avoid Swedish taxes may also have something to do with it."
In the case of Kamprad, it is definitely merely marketing. He hates paying taxes, and used the same passion for optimizing furniture to optimize his company structure. IKEA is one of the most complicated legal tax-evasion structures around. It is believed that a few percent of the worldwide revenue - not profits! - are going straight into Ingvar's pockets, tax-free. That's quite a feat.
Part of the reason the IKEA structure is so complicated is that it's engineered in a way to keep the both the tax benefits that everyone else also has (see Apple, Google, etc), and also keep the company in strict private Kamprad family control. Public companies like Apple don't need that extra complexity and get away with your standard Dutch-Irish sandwich
True technically but he is in dark grays - only a handful "national treasure" Swedish companies can make the Swedish state sometimes, not exactly look the other way, but not look very HARD.
(This was a long time ago of course, nowadays, IKEA is not very Swedish at all. It's not very particular anything. It's only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-national.)
It's fairly well known that Warren Buffet still lives in the house he bought in the fifties before he got ultra wealthy, but I was watching a documentary a couple of weeks back where he was explaining that his choice of breakfast at the McDonald's drive-thru window is dictated by the market closing price the day before. That's hardcore... and a little eccentric probably.
In [1], Bill Gates recounts an anecdote about Buffett (with a picture): Remember the laugh we had when we traveled together to Hong Kong and decided to get lunch at McDonald’s? You offered to pay, dug into your pocket, and pulled out…coupons!
Living in the same house is a popular fact, but it might be a little dishonest. It's a big house, with a lot of space around it, and it's obviously been kept up to date with somebody who has money. It's not at all like the 50 year old house my grandparents have.
I'm not sure how dishonest it is, as I can't imagine he stays put in the house for PR value.
Beyond that, I wouldn't assume that he's had an incredibly out-of-the-ordinary level of work done on the house. It's time-consuming, disruptive and messy.
Adjusting for his budget, I can only imagine this would all be made worse if the upgrades include holodecks, teleporters and a subterranean command center.
It's not like was the only car he owned. I mean, one could say Jay Leno drives some very old cars, and someone not knowing he's a car enthusiast collector could think he's frugal.
At one point in his life he drove a Porsche[1]. In fairness, he did drive the Volvo nearly 20 years --before he was advised to replace it because it was "dangerous" as he put it.
This is a popular thing to say, but it's nonsense. People get rich by making money, not by saving on secondhand Volvos. This is true even when we're talking about your regular-grade rich folks, but it's even more obviously true when talking about the richest people in the world.
It's possible if the government plays around with the tax system too much while being composed of idiots who don't understand basic math or don't understand why tax rates over 100% are bad.
As an example, former Croatian prime minister Jadranka Kosor introduced a new tax according to which if your after-tax income was above a certain limit, you had to pay an additional 4% of that income as tax. Of course this resulted in >100% marginal tax rates.
I assume Sweden had a similar situation, where it wasn't actually a 102% tax rate, but a combination of multiple different taxes that resulted in an effective tax rate over 100%. The people who created those taxes either didn't care or were simply too stupid to notice the problem.
It wasn't that common, but it was a real phenomenon that personal income marginal taxes could exceed 100 %. The Social Democrats in Sweden got angry when Astrid Lindgren pointed it out, and it seems some Hacker News readers with a downvote button become angry in the same way when this is mentioned.
The series that this is from '50 Thing that Made the Modern Economy' is really excellent. There is a podcast for it. I can't recommend it highly enough. Harford is also going to write a book on the subject.
Living in Norway I've had my share of Ikea products... My feeling towards Ikea is that their products are cheap, flimsy, and bland. I have a few of their products in my home now, but they'll definitely be replaced with something better; why I got them in the first place, considering how I feel about Ikea products? Cheap.
As for my books I wanted something more sturdy and went with what's just known here as a "Bombay bookshelf". Got it used, don't know which company produces them; unsure if it's related to the Canadian company.
I wouldn't buy a sofa from Ikea, except perhaps the Klippan. The rest aren't really good IMO. But neither are any of the other budget offerings from other stores. Unless you buy a super expensive designer sofa, you will get the flimsy feeling sofa. And if you look at the option, you can have 1 good quality sofa, or 5-10 cheap ones - it's not hard to see why people opt for the cheap model.
And this story continues with all other offerings in my experience. Ikea is the king in the budget segment - they offer more quality for money, than any of their competitors. You need to significantly upgrade the material choice to get better quality, and since that is not produced at scale it's significantly more expensive.
I'd like to add, that with IKEA you know what you can expect in terms of quality, sturdiness and usability. You know it's not the best, but you also know that it'll survive a few years and maybe moving once.
With other brands, your expectation has a broader variance.
* the discount furniture competitor also uses cheap material, but you cannot be sure that you can even assemble the furniture (lousy packaging and screws are missing or you aren't able to grasp the manual, etc).
* the quality brand thing might be amazing, or it might just be an expensive, good-looking piece of bad furniture. Anyone use USM Haller?
I admit: I buy all my furniture at IKEA. And helping friends move their furniture from place to place, I have learned, that IKEA is the choice if you don't want to become a furniture expert. They are sturdier than their reputation, their design doesn't quickly fall out of fashion (like other furniture often does) and overall a rational choice.
Also this seems to be reflected by the their resale value. I had lived a 1 h drive away from an IKEA last time I moved, and was able to sell off a lot of ikea furniture for prices I never dreamed reachable for used furniture. People knew what to expect, what the stuff cost new (because: catalog), didn't want to do the 1 hour drive and then felt like a high price was still reasonable.
I have too much Ikea furniture because, after moving to Denmark, it was the easiest way to buy everything I needed in just a couple of trips. My table seems to be good quality, but the sofa and bed are disappointing. I didn't like any of the coffee tables (sofaborde) so I have the 299kr "Lack" until I find something better.
It was difficult to find a shop selling better furniture than Ikea, except for the designer furniture stores in the centre of Copenhagen -- and I'm not ready to spend over 5000kr on a concrete-topped table.
> It was difficult to find a shop selling better furniture than Ikea, except for the designer furniture stores in the centre of Copenhagen -- and I'm not ready to spend over 5000kr on a concrete-topped table.
Same in the US. The options are: Ikea, Ikea knockoffs that're worse but somehow more expensive, tacky, bulky furniture that's poorly made and ~2x Ikea's prices, and then the high end that starts around 5x the price of Ikea, minimum, and goes up from there.
The semi-disposable nature of Ikea kinda fits modern US housing construction, anyway. It's odd to have a table that'll last 200+ years in a house that's gonna need significant cosmetic replacements (nothing's real solid wood so repairs/refinishes are right out) in 10-15 years, major renovation in 20-30 years, and will likely be torn down in 60 or fewer.
A perceptive assessment. You've got Ikea, which is generally quite tasteful, and then you have the likes of Target furniture, which is also tasteful yet somehow makes even the lowest-tier Ikea pieces seem rock-solid in comparison. You can step up to Art Van and get agonizingly milquetoast design for about 1.5x Ikea prices, or fiddly, baroque Arhaus for 2x.
Then you jump up to the likes of Restoration Hardware, in that 4-5x Ikea range, with the real vintage aesthetics Arhaus is hamfistedly aping, and after that, the ironically-named Design Within Reach which matches Ikea's minimalism with maximum durability at what seems like 10x Ikea prices.
I would say the one thing you've missed is Crate & Barrel, which is in maybe a 2-3x Ikea range and tends to have very tasteful design along with across-the-board durability.
I've had to resort to the secondhand market to find furniture I actually like. I've found that the Ikea-alternatives (Bohus, Skeidar, Møbelringen) in Norway is in general not of a greater quality, just way more costly, and in general, not that much better looking (aside from beds, couches, and chairs). I'm not paying 20 000 NOK for a "vitrineskap" (google says "display cabinet") at Bohus when Ikea's is of similar quality, but for 1/10th of the price.
I hear you on those Danish design furniture, often ugly, impractical, and expensive. But, I like the biggest of the "ball/egg chairs", the ones were there's enough room for two in one chair. Used to have one when I lived in Oslo, outside on the balcony. Isn't that by some Danish designer?
The one you are talking about was designed by Eero Aarnio, a Finnish designer. The Danish one is made by Arne Jacobsen and it resembles a minimalist arm chair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect"The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created."
It's understandable - their names in their respective languages is "Slovenija" and "Slovensko" which is relatively similar. Tougher still is discerning Slovenia and Slovakia in spoken Czech or Slovak - "Slovinsko" vs "Slovensko" - though context tends to help here :)
Another fun thing I have heard multiple times is that ordering electronics from China to "Ljubljana, Slovakia" somehow makes it from China to Slovakia and then Slovenia without going through customs in any of those two countries.
Does anyone know why this would be? Or maybe is it just pure luck?
I imagine that creates a special bond over time. :) In Sweden there are two municipalities who shared a website for a long time. Ironically? the HÅBO muni got to keep http://HABO.se while the HABO muni had to settle for http://HABOkommun.se
Interesting article, mostly it's about the processes behind the manufacture that allow them to hit their particular price/quality point.
One item that jumped out me: "Look at Gyllensvaans Mobler: compared to the 1980s, it is making 37 times as many bookcases, yet its number of employees has only doubled. Of course, that is thanks to all those German and Japanese robots."
Anything here with a decent design almost falls into the luxurious range.
Sure IKEA has some cheap stuff, but you can also get better products by buying their more expensive products. I bought a couch 10 years ago that I later sold to a friend and he is still using it. We had some Kallax (expedit) in our previous office bought in 2004 and are still being used by someone.
In Pakistan, IKEA furniture is an imported luxury good. There are fancy high-end boutiques selling IKEA furniture in the most upscale consumer markets.
In the mean time you can go to the crummiest street workshop and buy gorgeous handmade furniture with woodwork that you will never see in the West, sold for a pittance. It really boggles the mind.
> In Pakistan, IKEA furniture is an imported luxury good. There are fancy high-end boutiques selling IKEA furniture in the most upscale consumer markets.
Same here. Of course you pay double or triple the price you'd pay in Europe or the US, so it defeats its purpose.
> In the mean time you can go to the crummiest street workshop and buy gorgeous handmade furniture with woodwork that you will never see in the West, sold for a pittance. It really boggles the mind.
There are a lot of street vendors with handmade furniture here, except that those are pretty rough and plain ugly.
Another problem is that Mexicans are usually short. If you are above 6' like I am then most furniture will feel small. Usable, but small.
I just wanted to chime in and say I hate buying furniture from Ikea. I think they have have a few decent items, and the real wood bookcases looks sturdy but most of their stuff is laminated MDF. I have a real wood changing table that they unfortunately discontinued years ago that has held up well over the years, except for the drawer rails. Ikea doesn't sell replacement parts for it and it is a custom size, so can't go to Home Depot to find a replacement. Thankfully I was able to find a site that seems to specialize in Ikea replacement parts and it was almost an exact fit. I only plan on buying used furniture or making my own in the future.
I was in the market for a large dining room table and looked at their offerings, and with the table and benches was over $600. I went to Craigslist and there were several wood workers who could make you a farmhouse table out of quality, furniture grade hardwod for that price. Ended up fixing the antique dining room table I broke during the big move and using that instead.
I've never been to an Ikea. Until recently there wasn't one in my state. Because of this I'm always amazed that so many people seem to have this fascination with it.
It's set up to be something of an experience. I go to my local (but not conveniently nearby) one every couple of years or so and there's definitely entertainment value to the whole thing.
I wouldn't know Ikea furniture if I tripped over it. I'd barely ever heard of the company until ~5 years ago. It's almost as if I'd never seen a TV program, given its apparent cultural significance.
For the price it's well made and looks pretty nice. Better than what you get at a big box and less than what you get at a furniture store. It's really hard to find furniture in the US.
I don't like buying IKEA furniture for two reasons:
1 - With a handful of exceptions, IKEA furniture looks like... IKEA furniture! It reminds Henry Ford and his "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."
2 - Most important, while I appreciate its hack-ability, it's important for me to get quickly an idea of the budget involved. I understand that there's no standard IKEA wardrobe, because you can assemble it as you like, but when I see an exposed example I'd like to know the price of the whole thing as it is. If I don't know how much it will cost, more or less, I can't decide whether to buy there or elsewhere, thus I'm not ready to dive into the detailed calculations of N shelves and X hooks.
I'm genuinely surprised by your #2, because predictable pricing is the number one reason for me to rarely consider anything other than Ikea.
It might be a cultural thing, maybe the difference between Ikea and other alternatives goes along a very different line where you live. Here, conventional furniture stores are still pretty much selling at highly individualized prices, where they pull some random fantasy "regular price" out of thin air and leave it to short term campaigns and the discretion of individual salespersons to dazzle the customer with huge discounts. But if their "regular price" is so much of a fantasy that discounts >50% are the norm, how do I know the 60% discount is a reasonable deal and not something that will still make them laugh at me behind my back, for not driving it down to 90%? I very much prefer paying a predictable margin of which I know that it makes them rich by selling volume over paying a black box margin that might be twice as high as the next guy's because I did not achieve as good a cultural fit with my assigned salesperson, or because they already hit their volume goals for today and are now aiming for the margin bonus. It's annoying enough that I have to play these games with naturally individual transactions like when buying a used car, but for factory new mass produced items like furniture I'll gladly skip on the haggling game.
Chains of sofa stores in Italy follow this pattern to the point that ads are slightly ironic about their discounts and/or try to divert attention towards good craftsmanship, quality, etc.
Stores of expensive or custom furniture are completely different, with genuine market pressures keeping prices and quotes in check.
Regarding your point 2 - have you been to an Ikea recently? They always put up prices for the way it is assembled in the showroom, so you see something cost €324, of which the main corpus is 156, the added part on the left is 68, etc., broken down into the boxes you actually have to buy. So you should get a pretty good feeling for what your version of the furniture will cost.
Amd about the look, well, that's just subjective taste, isn't it? I actually like the clean lines of their, and almost everything in my apartment is Ikea. From time to time I visit other furniture stores, because my girlfriend likes browsing there, but I never really find anything I would want in my little world at home. Seems like a typical case of YMMV...
IKEA furniture here in Silicon Valley means that you're a tech intern living in a starter apartment (and you're spending all your money on rent instead of anything else). College kids have to practically give away all of their surplus IKEA furniture at the end of every summer (along with their unused bicycles) once their Facebook internships end because everyone is selling and nobody is buying. I'm always amused when someone thinks they can sell their Galant for nearly full price on Craigslist in August.
> Regarding your point 2 - have you been to an Ikea recently?
No, I haven't. Thanks for the update!
> about the look, well, that's just subjective taste, isn't it?
I think I wasn't clear enough. I don't complain about quality/look: what I don't like is the standardisation! As soon as you see something from IKEA, you know it's from IKEA.
For many, that standardization is a feature rather than bug. I really like that I can mix and match anything and have it look visually consistent. I am a big fan of the products although I build them slightly nonstandard (extra lag screws, wood glue on all surfaces, VHB tape to affix to wall).
I understand that's a completely different world, but the idea is that you can have consistency in your whole house without giving up the possibility of choosing what fits your taste more.
IKEA does something similar to the Vitsoe called ALGOT -- probably not as fancy looking, but pretty neutral and versatile. You can buy sets or you can buy it in individual pieces and customise to your heart's content.
Just yesterday I put up some ALGOT shelves in my bedroom, and I'm planning a much more elaborate install in my home office too.
Billy bookcases are great if you use them right. Best to get the narrow models and fix them next to each other with carefully placed wood screws.
This makes super rigid and durable shelves for heavy books and the shelves never noticeably sag because the span is so short. You can also customize the heights of the shelves with fine granularity.
I dislike IKEA furniture - It never seems to go well, and always in a different, hard-to-plan-for kind of way. Either the bed frame slats will crack at an odd place, or the bookshelf will bend under the weight of too many books, or perhaps a layer of plastic-ish(?) faux-wood will peel off revealing the flimsy glue pressed wood-ish material inside.
I understand the appeal of well designed, flatpacked, self assembled furniture - but why does the quality have to be so terrible? Is it so they can produce and sell at volume? It would be nice to see an intersection of medium/high quality end furniture that I can buy and assemble like IKEA products.
I have had exactly the opposite experience as yours. You describe every flat pack furniture brand except Ikea.
The only thing Ikea doesn't do superbly (for the price) is padded furniture. Their chairs and couches are terrible, in my opinion. Their cabinets, though? Their desks? Great look, and reliable for years. I am proud of my Billy bookshelf and the books on it in the living room.
I think you're both a little bit correct. Ikea probably sells the best quality flat-pack furniture out there, but I think it's pretty fair to expect their stuff to fail in some way within 5 years of normal use. Keep in mind the failure may or may not be catastrophic, and the item may still be usable for some time. They're definitely a good value, but only if you're OK with eventually needing to buy replacements.
Some personal anecdotes:
Lack coffee tables: utter trash, fell apart quickly (in a way reminiscent of what the grandparent post described)
Galant desk: still going strong after 12 years and 3 moves.
Aneboda dresser(s): Got three, 100% track failure after a few years and no longer suitable for daily use.
Billy bookcase: re-shelving books pushed the backing loose, and the thing looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa until emergency repairs were undertaken. Will be junked in the next move.
Six years ago I bought one of those longer Lacks for ~15EUR and heavily use it close to every day. The black top varnish seems to get pretty thin at the most used locations which is the only wear marks I can spot.
I use it for eating, writing, etc. Maybe others have other plans to use a coffee table in a way that requires tougher structures.
I think lateral stresses (from people's feet, etc) did mine in. The seams failed, and things quickly deteriorated after that. A lot of Ikea stuff is designed with zero redundancy or design margin, so if any part fails or weakens the whole structure is compromised.
From what I saw, they're made out of a tiny amount of laminated cardboard. I personally wouldn't trust it, but maybe it would work if all lateral stress was avoided.
I consider the Lack tables to have a functional service life of two years - if its lightly used, much longer - but under daily use, just buy a new one every two years - even with that - after 10 years, money wise I'm still ahead of more durable furniture.
Are there other flat pack furniture brands? I did not know this. I had all IKEA up until I started replacing IKEA with already-built pieces from garage sales/ furniture stores/ family.
Maybe I have just gotten unlucky, and fallen in the tail end of their defects.
Sauder is the only other one I know of. Their stuff seems to be pretty well designed and of good quality, though I wish they were more unapologetic about being fiberboard, as I'm not a huge fan of fake wood textures.
As a counter point, ikea furniture works well enough for most loads but I have a chest of drawers and the bottom of the drawers is made from something similar to a less stiff version of masonite. for clothes it would be fine but for anything else the bottom of the drawers bends and scrapes the next drawer when opening. I need to retrofit the bottom to something worthwhile.
I've also never encountered those issues mentioned with Ikea furniture and have had them with others. I'm not sure if they were technically "flat-pack," but many years prior to seeing or knowing what an Ikea is, I've assembled things like computer desks and TV stands. They all had the issues described: lament peels off, too flimsy.
There are (from searching) several supplies of cheap, flatpack furniture for landlords, which probably explains why half the properties I rented as a student had the same furniture, made of 5mm thick hardboard and bits of plastic. That stuff didn't even hold together properly when it was new, let alone a couple of years old.
Habitat should be decent quality. MFI used to be a major retailer of flat-pack stuff, but they went bankrupt in 2015. My parents bought almost everything for the kids' rooms from MFI. None of it is broken, 15-25 years later.
That wardrobe's not really a flatpack, though. Last time I looked, Argos's flatpacks were similarly priced to IKEA's, though I haven't really looked in a while.
I love IKEA furniture for their hackability -- I built pretty much all of my furniture out of Kallax bookshelves reconfigured in various ways. I also store about 95% of my possessions in Kallax baskets and drawers so it's super-easy to move to a new apartment. If I move to a new city I can sell the shelves, ship the baskets with the stuff in them (put into cubic cardboard boxes), and buy new IKEA shelves at the destination because there will be an IKEA there.
I had to reinforce the baskets though because they were falling apart :-/
There's a lot of quality variability within IKEAs range as well. They have a bookcase line cheaper than Billy and you can tell it's there just so they can advertise something at a particular price point - I wouldn't want to own one. They have have a more expensive line made out of solid wood that is really good quality for not too much more.
I find that you can get a good feel for the quality of the stuff at the showrooms, since they get so manhandled by customers
As a designer friend puts it, IKEA is all in the edit. You can get some good stuff there, but you have to be careful about the design, the surfaces, and the finish of the materials. And you can't have too high a concentration of IKEA stuff in a room, or it looks too bland.
My library lives in 10 IKEA plywood bookcase units, about 20 linear meters of shelves, that is a really excellent piece. Simple design, all in birch plywood, and just the right strength (enhanced by using wood glue during assembly). It's been in use for 15 years now and still looks great.
These blanket statements are silly. How can you dislike all IKEA furniture when you probably haven't even used 99.9% of it? I have an IKEA Galant desk and it's been the best desk I've ever owned. I've also had it for over 10 years and it still looks as good as the day I bought it.
Bed - it was 200 or 300, lasted 10+ years. Veneer peeled off in 2 places (scraped it like crazy moving it 2x inc. up/down stairs, stored it for a year). Sold it in the end, crazy.
"Cubes" Bookcase - had it for 6+ years, moving it 1x was enough to make it too wobbly for us but still were able to sell it. Tip: leave 1-2 cubes empty and arrange books by color, looks awesome.
Med + small coffee tables - total garbage, putting your feet up on them like once is enough to make it way too wobbly. Small one is fine for a side table.
Malm dressers - had these 8+ years and still use them. Got a skinny tall one and a wide short one because I thought they matched the vibe of Hotel Nikko in SF.
Wood countertops - amazing and amazingly cheap compared to any other countertop options we found (by a big margin).
I think the MALM drawers are just as iconic - I've had so many of them as I've moved around different homes (and subsequently donated to charity when I didn't have space). They're probably made of the same crap substrate and laminate as everything else, but they're quite heavy and feel substantial.
the confusingly named "Norden occasional table" (it's a sideboard, people!) is apparently discontinued, and I can't think why. in terms of quality and sheer utility at a low price it tops pretty much any piece of storage oriented furniture I've ever bought. completely transformed my kitchen, looks good, and has held up well.
If you stick to the items they sell made out of actual wood instead of particle board it's a good value and as durable as anything. Where it gets shoddy is the accessories and furniture made out of particle board / MDF etc. You have to be good at spotting the the real wood though because they use a lot of faux wood veneers over particle board that are hard to spot if you aren't looking closely.
IKEA furniture is often bought with the understanding that it's relatively disposable. There's a lot of demand for that in cities where people move around more often.
Campaign living can't even deliver on a chair I ordered in November - I doubt they will even capture a significant portion of the market they originally set out to cut into.
I don't like any compressed wood (engineered wood) furniture, it's got too many fillers and (toxic) adhesives and they don't have the same rigidity of solid wood.
Make sure the back is positioned correctly (seated within the recess, and with all corners at right angles), and use twice the number of nails Ikea suggests. This will help maintain rigidity during a move.
Heh, I did that with a 5x5 Billy^W Expedit bookcase in a basement suite... And discovered, when moving out, that it would not fit up the stairs assembled. Hope the next tenant liked it!
> I understand the appeal of well designed, flatpacked, self assembled furniture - but why does the quality have to be so terrible?
Ikea stuff doesn't sell because it's flatpacked and self-assembled. It sells because it's really cheap. Flatpacking and self-assembly are different ways of cutting down on costs.
If you want to use it as a bookshelf, it works fine. If you want to buy the little cloth cube drawers it works good as a dresser or for storage. If you want a bed side stand you get 2 cubes tall, if you want a shelf you get 4.
Billy just seems kind of weird and irregular with the varying widths. I wouldn't want one either.
> The Billy innovations are about working within the limits of production and logistics, finding tiny ways to shave more off the cost, all while producing something that looks inoffensive and does the job.
The perfect summary of Ikea's engineering.
I got into woodworking recently; designed and built a 50", full-back garden bench from scratch in redwood. The project gave me a more keen awareness of the wood that surrounds our lives. I've ruminated on everything from sustainability of wood to the pros/cons of engineered wood products like those used in most Ikea furniture.
When my wife and I bought a headboard for our bed, one of those cheap bookcase/headboard combos bought online for $150 shipped, I couldn't help myself from wondering whether this boxed slab of wood and glue was an engineering marvel, or an abomination. The odor, the comically insufficient assembly instructions, the chipped off veneer and color matching marker. Was it all worth the cost savings?
I once thought that engineered wood products like those used in these cheap flat pack were stronger than natural wood. A lot of that furniture felt lighter to me. In fact, engineered wood products _can_ be stronger, and get used in building architectures that would not be possible with natural wood. But the stuff used in cheap furniture is MDF and that weird, coarser particle board. My limited research showed MDF as being weaker than most natural softwoods, in terms of strength to density. The lightness of the furniture comes from simply designing the products to use less wood.
Ikea furniture, as this article discusses, is optimized. The least amount of substrate is used to achieve the goal. That's not a bad thing; it's a thing to be admired. But you could do the same thing with natural wood, and the end result would be lighter.
The odor, caused by binding resins used in the engineered wood, is also an indicator of off-gassing formaldehyde. I figured, the stuff being used couldn't be that bad or they wouldn't have been able to sell it for so long. The answers I found were unclear. Formaldehyde _is_ bad; it's a carcinogen, and as it off-gasses from these materials the concentration of formaldehyde in the air slowly rises throughout the enclosed space; throughout your house. The more formaldehyde containing products in your home, the higher the concentration. It's a potentially significant health hazard. There are alternative resins that don't contain formaldehyde, but they aren't commonly used.
The most important thing about this cheap furniture, I figured, is that it's good for the environment. The optimized design reduces the use of wood to a minimum, and the engineered wood can make optimal use of trees since it just needs chips or sawdust. I grew up in the 90s where it was common to joke how every piece of paper you wasted was killing a tree. The implication being that wood products are a scarce resource that we need to preserve and use as little of as possible. We all needed to be good caretakers of our planet. Recycle, cut down less trees, and boybands. It was the 90's.
As my ruminations stumbled over this mantra of the green movement it occurred to me that wood ... is a sustainable resource. We can always grow more trees, right? I see so much household wood being replaced by engineered wood and plastics. But plastics are non-renewable! We can't grow more oil. There's ultimately no consequence of "wasting" wood. Just throw more seeds on the ground and let the complex nano-machinery of life assemble a brand new piece. It costs nothing but time and land (which we have plenty of). The discarded piece of wood becomes food for the next.
Certainly wasting wood increases costs. Engineered wood is cheaper because it can use the table scraps of sawmills. But cost wasn't the concern in this trail of thought; it was the environment. From an environmental perspective, we should be using as much wood as we possibly can, and enact laws that require all wood products to be sourced from trees grown for that purpose. We can take advantage of this beautiful renewable resource and ensure an explosion in tree population. Our air will be fresher, more carbon will get locked back up in solid material, and the reduction in plastics consumption will dump less carbon into the air.
At the end of my adventure I decided ... this kind of furniture is not for me. Natural wood products are better for the environment, lighter, look better, last longer, and are less toxic. The only thing against them is cost. Whether cost matters or not is a different question entirely. For me, I'll sit on my redwood bench out in the sun and smile.
" In fact, engineered wood products _can_ be stronger, and get used in building architectures that would not be possible with natural wood. But the stuff used in cheap furniture is MDF and that weird, coarser particle board. My limited research showed MDF as being weaker than most natural softwoods, in terms of strength to density. The lightness of the furniture comes from simply designing the products to use less wood.
"
MDF is both heavier and weaker in just about all cases. By far. It's not even a close contest. Part of it is because it's a very short-strand material.
"The odor, caused by binding resins used in the engineered wood, is also an indicator of off-gassing formaldehyde."
(for the interested, it's because they all used urea-formaldehyde glue)
Plywood used in furniture is usually formaldehyde free these days, or has almost undetectable levels (it's all carb p2 compliant). Since about 2009, the levels are about 20x less than they used to be. MDF is not usually FF free, just because of the amount of glue used. But it's still 20x better than it used to be ;)
But to put in perspective:
All the plywood i get is FF free, and i don't have to do anything to get it. Columbia, who is the largest manufacturer of plywood in the US, has been making "purebond" plywood since 2005.
That's what everyone from home depot, to lumber yards, are selling you now. Other major manufs are similar these days.
You can actually get MDF from columbia that is FF free. Just more expensive.
One of the main reasons they use engineered wood is because it's stable.
You wouldn't really make the sides of cabinets out of hardwood, it would move too much. They alternate grain direction in plywood to make it very stable dimensionally.
But in terms of what engineered wood, i'd agree using plywood is a better thing to do than using MDF or other particleboards.
They have solid wood options, but you have to hunt for them. Also, they tend to up the price and it's "fancier" looking.
Your comment makes me wish I had the space to get back into woodworking, but I just bought Ikea today because it fits into a small car and apartment easily.
> Your comment makes me wish I had the space to get back into woodworking, but I just bought Ikea today because it fits into a small car and apartment easily.
Yeah, I wish the hobby was more accessible. It's relaxing in a strange way. The work is hard and laborious, but I find a sense of peace, almost like mindfulness, when I'm standing over a piece of wood licking the sand paper back and forth, or concentrating on my brush strokes trying to make every movement better than the last. And then you have this physical object in your home. For all its faults and imperfections, it's still a monument of accomplishment. It reminds you every day. That's so different from software which doesn't have that same sense of object permanence.
I know hackerspaces exist, and sometimes they have tools related to woodworking. But I've never had one near enough to me to be worthwhile, and the thought of starting one in California where land is so expensive and interest so sparse ... So I had to wait until buying a home before I could have the opportunity to work with wood again.
It's quite accessible if you don't look at too many woodworking magazines. You can do everything to a very high standard with chisels, planes and a few saws.
You're not in it for speed or economy, so why not? In many cases, for one-of-a-kind items, hand tools are even faster than power tools. And the mess left behind is shavings that sweep up nicely, rather than dust that gets everywhere.
I had a very nice shop in a spare apartment bedroom when I was single, and built a few celtic harps, a guitar, several bookcases, and some cabinets, doing most of the work after neighbours were asleep. No complaints about noise or dust.
Woodworking as a hobby really seems to touch upon something for those of us who work on a computer all day long. The physical aspect is rewarding; whatever you create is real instead of the ephemeral virtuality of software.
Moving from an apartment to a house with room for a (small) workshop was liberating in that respect.
Ikea furniture truly is well engineered though, and I agree with the environmental benefit of Ikea flat-pack furniture — although I am critical of the mindset it fosters where furniture is now a consumable rather than a long term investment.
Whenever people dump broken and worn down Ikea furniture by the road side for collection by the municipal garbage service, I forage a bit for the clever Ikea hardware (like those handy demountable nuts and bolts used in the Billy) for use in my own projects.
They have been producing more and more solid wood options since 2015 or so. Since the end of 2016 there are quite a few nice looking solid wood options.
I should know. I've been there a lot recently.
Some are flimsy, but easily fixed with a few cheap parts from the hardware store. You can also get most things in a natural finish so you can paint it yourself.
Another reason IKEA optimizes for low weight and small size is to reduce transportation costs (which also means lower fuel consumption). Shaving off a few mm here, a few grams here, and deconstructing this or that part means that suddenly you can pack twice as many book-cases in a container, and reduce transportation by half.
Of course, that's all moot if it's offset by the stuff breaking and needing to be replaced in half the time...
I moved overseas and needed a bookcase that wouldn't break the bank but also that I knew I could trust. (I have lots of books).
I grew up with our basement library as Billies and knew that I could trust them and also when I got more books over time, that I could just buy more of the same and not worry about mismatching.
There are various websites dedicated to Ikea hacks, such as [1]. I've always wanted to try one, but they often seem to be more work than they're worth.
Still looking for a board game friendly bookshelf from one of the major chains. Depth is the problem, need roughly 30cm of usable depth. I'm currently using IVAR but it's more of a temporary solution. I own about 4 Billy for books they are decent but not great. One thing in their favor is that you can easily add another one. I'd also like it if IKEA would report the usable depth of the shelves in addition to the total depth.
As a record collector, I feel your pain. For depth I'd look at the Galant shelves. Even the shallower upper units are 40cm deep, and it's wide enough for games in the way that Expedit wasn't.
The open backed Kallax units are the ideal size for storing 12" vinyl, and the vertical dividers mean you don't have too many records leaning on each other. They are also good for larger items that need to overhang the back of the shelf a bit.
Every branch of IKEA is littered with tape measures, and every product they sell is on display somewhere, so you can check practically every dimension of their products. They encourage customers to be hands on with the furniture. That's one of the most brilliant bits of their design thinking when it comes to their stores. I've never seen it anywhere else.
Only if the store is close by or you're willing to make a somewhat spontaneous decision. Imagine driving 3h+ to the nearest store, measuring the stuff not being 100% sure if it actually has enough space etc. etc.
Also the IKEA in store experience is a total nightmare for me (it sucks all energy out of me and sometimes even creates mild anxiety depending on how full the store is) so I'd rather get as much preplanned as I possibly can to minimize in store exposure.
The prototypical board game bookshelf is still from Ikea, the KALLAX. They've got the deep square shelves that can hold six or seven square box board games pretty easily. If you look at almost any board game reviewers, behind them is nothing but Kallax shelves (especially Dice Tower).
I've got 1 2x4 and 2 2x2s and they hold about 90 games total. On the 2x2s I have about 10 of the small box (Kosmos sized) 2 player games and on the other I have 2 baskets for tiny card games that holds about 30 more games). I also keep some games on top of my 2x4 Kallax. So they probably hold about 125 games total.
I recently got one of these for the kids room. It's all steel construction, the shelves actually seem pretty solid, they seem to have a lattice or some reinforcement inside. Depth of 13 3/4 inch / 35cm is perfect for board games.
Make one! Bookshelves are pretty easy to make and don't require a lot of tools, knowledge, or skills. Plan the dimensions, buy the boards, cut them, screw together.
If you can't make one at home look into joining a hackerspace.
Another Ikea superstar is the Lack table (the small square one). Sturdy, functional, easy to assemble, cheap, stackable (using glue), comes in different colors, can be easily disassembled and tucked away when not needed.
IKEA and other similar sell that furniture that is optimized to be 80% of nothing. I say that again, the biggest part of the finished product is nothing.
so what that does mean? It means that if you take a proper durable furniture and compare it with the IKEA counterpart the IKEA furniture has 80% of the matter replaced with nothing. ;-)
Buy once, assemble once then throw it away since i'll fall apart.
I don't disagree, but is there really a problem with that if you get the design you want for the price you want? If you are talking something like a couch, then yeah you will have problems. But I have an Ikea table I use as a desk that is just laminated particle board with metal legs and it has served me just fine for the past 7 years (Along with going through two moves.) It is no longer my main desk, but it still functions and looks fine.
I'd say a majority of furniture in anyone's house gets very little actual wear and tear. Couches, chairs, beds - sure. But coffee tables, end tables, nightstands, bookshelves, tv cabinets, tables? Does it really matter if they are almost never touched (more then moving around small trinkets on them?)
I believe that's the point: you never notice a Billy, it turns into part of the wall. You can build a wall of storage with shelves in various places, and it's fully extensible.
>although the four decades he spent living in Switzerland to avoid Swedish taxes may also have something to do with it.
This flies in the face of what we've been told about socialism. It looks like rich people do leave the country to save on taxes. Wow, who'd have thought.
>I’m Glenn Fiedler and I’ve been a game developer for the last 15 years.
If he is in the scene for so long, he should know about the timing problems in browsers: The JavaScript VM can schedule your game any time it likes and it's pretty much impossible to get consistent framerates across all browsers. As someone who has developed a variety of JavaScript games - I will not do it again until we get more powerful and accurate timers.
There are still many obstacles for good JavaScript games.
To be fair to browsers, it's impossible to get consistent frame rates on anything. That's why games rely on the delta between frames instead of constant values.
I have 6 Billys and my parents have something like 10. When I worked at a small startup and needed to fit out some field offices, I bought two things from the store, a Galant desk and a Billy bookshelf for each employee. Two Galants turn into a reasonable conference table. The employees loved both, a simple sturdy desk that doesn't dictate function and a highly customizable wall, they quickly became filled with all kinds of personalization. Cost per employee? something like $250.
They lasted for years and when the startup finally sold and closed up, the new owners didn't want the furniture, so we asked around and found a battered women's shelter who had just placed a woman and three kids into an apartment. They had been living without any furniture at all. Suddenly our reception couch turned into a living room couch, our Galants turned into their dining room table and our extra chairs turned into their dining room tables. Desk lamps became living room lamps and torches lit the bedrooms. Billys became impromptu wardrobes in all the bedrooms. After the move, all they needed were some mattresses, but they at least had an apartment full of other furniture. But I came away impressed at the general versatility of the furniture. Nearly a decade later, that family still has their Billys.
Billys basically get out of the way and turn into walls with storage. I've never bought the accessories (doors, etc.), but all the ones I know turn into curio cabinets as much as bookshelves. Nobody really cares much about what shelves look like, they care about what's on them and in that sense IKEA nailed it.
I also have a handful of other shelves from various manufacturers and it's very weird how they get things wrong and how optimized a piece of furniture the Billy is. It's weird to get so passionate about such a plain looking piece of furniture, but it's really kind of perfection of form.