Ikea’s real genius: making furniture disposable

By all accounts, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was my kind of guy: may he rest in peace (on an Askvoll standard double). Like me, he was a skinflint. For a multibillionaire to buy his clothes at flea markets and select his groceries from supermarket quick-sale shelves is charming. About his retail wares, I’m more ambivalent. Look, hats off to Ingvar for making halfway-attractive furniture available to the hoi polloi at affordable prices. Yet every time I’ve succumbed to the allure of a cheap-and-cheerful Ikea design, I’ve ended up hating it.

Part of the problem is the look. Cheap-and-cheerful is not my bag. I’m more into cheap-and-morose. In a profile a while ago, a journalist characterised my home as freighted with ‘grandma furniture’. Further, that cut-rate Scandi look is now so recognisable that you might as well leave the Ikea price tags dangling off the chairs. I’d rather my house look uniquely crap than exactly like the house next door.