Ikea has two or three price points for each product. The cheapest will be made from chipboard or even cardboard. The most expensive varies, it might be pine or even something better.
IKEA's cheapened their offerings quite a bit over the years. Pre-pandemic, used to be you could buy a solid wood butcher block and solid wood cabinet doors and fronts. Now? The butcher block is particleboard with end grain themed veneer and the closest to solid wood cabinet hardware you'll get is a set of bamboo drawer fronts.
I have their solid wood butcher block (made from prisms of solid wood glued together) and a countertop made from the same material. When oiled to given instructions, both are pretty indestructible under normal use.
It's very sad that they're not made anymore. I guessed it just was not imported here due to its prohibitive cost, but not being able to find it on the other side of the pond is saddening.
I bought their highest end leather couch with a fold out bed a couple years ago, due to time constraints. I was very unhappy to see it was made from chipboard. Of course their shelves and such you can see what you are buying, but I would not trust anything upholstered myself.
(Though the oak version, which costs more, is oak-veneered particleboard.)
Many Ikea things aren't designed to last. That table has cross-beams, so it has a better chance surviving a party where someone leans heavily against one end of it. Something like Mörbylånga [2] looks like it would collapse.
I would give the furniture on display a good shove to see how sturdy it is.
I actually have the Mörbylånga table at home and I find it very sturdy. One thing which the pictures doesn't show is that there are two supporting beams under the table, which provides the necessary strength to not collapse on first touch. Obviously, I have not done the actual test, but I will try to remember and report back if the table ever breaks.
Tangential, but if your table doesn't break in the next few days then you won't be able to report back, since editing and replying to comments get disabled after some days. I don't know what the exact time frame is like though.
> their shelves and such you can see what you are buying
no you can't, the outside shell of each shelf completely hides what's inside. I wanted to reconfigure a shelf (turn it on it's side, combine it with another) and turns out the "boards" are hollow. There is something inside at the corner pre-drilled-screw anchor points, but that's the only place you can attach something, the rest of it is potemkin shelf. You get to see this in more detail if you keep a shelf in a mildly humid place like a beachhouse, as the whoe thing delaminates and you see cardboard honeycombs inside a thin veneer of ...veneer
One of the things that complicates this conversation is that people who are huge fans of some specific Ikea furniture model bought it X years ago, and in the meanwhile its construction methods have switched to something cheaper. The "same" product can be both good and bad, depending on the year it was made.
I feel like the thing to do is to give whatever you are looking at in the showroom a pretty good shake, and to sit down on it hard. If it's creaky or loose at all there, it'll fall apart in no time at home
For now it is holding up and "feels" sturdy after a couple years, but I have no doubt it will fail at least 5 years before I would otherwise expect it to (I would want 10 years, but now expect 5). My fault for trusting Ikea + higher end = good without further verification.
Ikea used to have price points for each product. It was my goto for butcher block countertops but they have since transitioned to offering only crappy all veneer spongeboard.[0]
