How Ikea's Billy bookcase took over the world
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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.
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).
That's intentional. Most of it is junk, except these specific items.
It is light so that's a plus.
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.
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.
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.
They don't do furniture, though.
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.
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.
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.
And the average quality is less than zero.
Did anyone else shudder?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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
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).
Doable, but it entails some cost.
Could you expand on that? Obviously people do want Ikea, so why wouldn't people want mass-produced really-good furniture?
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.
Let's take http://www.crateandbarrel.com/dakota-77-dining-table/s517252
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.
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.
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'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.
[1] Of Cryptonomicon/System of the World Fame
The only exceptions for me are couches (nobody figured out how to make a comfortable couch until c.1980) and mattresses.
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.
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.
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21702428-georg...
Furniture assembly is surprisingly non-automated.
Similarly, there are TVs that are much more expensive, but you decided to go for this one.
Your table could conceivably stay in functioning order for 2000 years. More likely 500 years.
Quality built wood furniture has essentially an indefinite lifespan.
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".
(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)
I remember being surprised by that new unit but also astonished by the fact that I instinctively understood what he meant.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I love these and have a few: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30275861/#/102758...
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00263850/ is the one most people mean when they talk about "a billy": a neutral person-tall thin enough to be flexible bookcase.
> Personally, I love these and have a few: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30275861/#/102758....
I also like Kallax, not the 4x4 or 5x5 though (too inflexible imo) but I've got multiple 2x4, 1x4 and 2x2.
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.
(Also, sometimes those stories are merely marketing, and they have a personal chef and private jet too.)
Is that known?
[1]http://blog.trejdify.com/2012/08/lessons-learned-ikea-startu...
Found it:
I guess I must have remembered it wrong but the point was a billionaire orders his mcmuffin based on the day-to-day of the indexes.
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.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/patagonias-phil...
I think you mean tax avoidance.
(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.)
EDIT - This site shows that it peaked at 61%.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/personal-income-tax-r...
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.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/infographic-of-the-day/...
It even had a pretty decent episode on compilers.
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.
https://s1.postimg.org/l6f3izmkf/bombay.jpg
There's actually an Ikea dresser in this photo.
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.
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?
http://zedomax.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/ball-chai...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's interesting as there is actually no IKEA store in Slovenia yet and I am not aware of any other store stocking IKEA furniture here...
Does anyone know why this would be? Or maybe is it just pure luck?
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."
http://www.gyllensvaan.se/galleri.htm
(I imagine Google Translate would work well on these pages.)
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 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.
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 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.
Caveat emptor always applies at IKEA!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Stores of expensive or custom furniture are completely different, with genuine market pressures keeping prices and quotes in check.
One I can afford, the other... I cannot.
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.
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.
The only other bookshelf system I use is the "Hungarian Bookshelf" (https://www.instructables.com/id/Hungarian-Shelves/). You basically make this yourself with wood. Excellent for the basement.
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.
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.
Maybe I have just gotten unlucky, and fallen in the tail end of their defects.
> the bottom of the drawers is made from something
In British, we call this "hardboard". I've always assumed it's "hard" in comparison to cardboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardboard
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.
They discontinued it in the US or I would buy it again and take a loss on the resale of my fancier couch.
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.
But perfect width between the legs to mount 19" rack gear.
If you want something to last you aren't going to get it for $8 no matter where you buy it.
I use it for eating, writing, etc. Maybe others have other plans to use a coffee table in a way that requires tougher structures.
The electric standing desks in Sweden are far superior quality to any IKEA futurnature I've ever seen down here.
I do wonder if over time companies like Casper / Tuft & Needle, or even Campaign Living (http://www.campaignliving.com/) will cut into IKEA's turf.
I had to reinforce the baskets though because they were falling apart :-/
I've never been disappointed with any of the solid wood articles.
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).
you can see a picture here: https://www.decorist.com/finds/5895/norden-occasional-table/
Lumber Liquidators has the same price for thicker oak butcher block countertops. Woodcraft has similarly priced thicker birch butcher block.
I am absolutely horrified. Herbert Putnam is spinning in his grave, you monster.~
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
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.
"It's basically compressed cardboard," they told me.
Sometimes literally http://www.refinery29.com/2016/01/101948/ikea-lack-table
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, that's all moot if it's offset by the stuff breaking and needing to be replaced in half the time...
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.
As for the sustainability: http://www.columbiaforestproducts.com/us/the-columbia-story/ See "In 1999, "
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.
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.
I started scouring the as-is section for a spare shelf, in hopes of fitting a few more books into the space.
After a few searches with no luck, I hit google for a recommended Ikea hack, and was pleasantly surprised to learn they actually sell extra shelves: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20265301/
If you can't make one at home look into joining a hackerspace.
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.
Too bad I own about 200 games. :/
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.
For my taste Expedit looks nicer and there are many hacks that involve it.
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'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?)
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.
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.
Sounds like planned obsolescence.