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Comment by stetrain | Hacker News Reader

My biggest issue is that, like so many markets, there is a "missing middle" created by this downward price pressure.

For the most part if you want a piece of furniture (ie a nightstand), there are two categories. Either you buy the Amazon/Wayfair version made of pressboard for $100-$200, or you can find a solid wood heirloom version for $2,000+. The domestic plywood or cheaper solid wood options are no longer mass produced at the scale that they used to be.

There's very little in between, even if I'm willing to pay a bit more for something a bit nicer.

I think one reason Ikea is so popular is that they ride the upper end of the cheap segment. Offering low-priced items but with reasonable instructions, a minimum expectation of quality, and at least there's a physical store to look at it before you buy and return it if it's damaged or doesn't work.

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And part of the problem is that it is so hard to tell if the middle priced goods are worth it. For example:

- is it real wood but cheaply finished so the wood wears quickly and needs refinishing quickly. Seen this problem so often at priced places like crate & barrel.

- how do you tell good quality veneer from bad?

- showcase pieces of higher quality than what's delivered to your house. Room & board with their real wood furniture can be like this - I got a piece that was more knots than wood.

Exactly. I've been looking for bookshelves and wanted something that wasn't just Ikea's Billy. The price jump to something from Pottery Barn is 3-4x the Ikea price, but from the quality you see at the showroom, it should be closer to 1.5-2x the price. I also feel a bit jaded from the mid-tier furniture showrooms, which offer Wayfair quality at 2x the price. I just want something that will survive a move while not having to look at payment plan!

Ikea does have a higher end bookcase than Billy: Hemnes[0]. It's like 2x the price, and I think it's worth about that, given it's made from mostly solid wood (back is still fiberboard).

0:https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hemnes-bookcase-black-brown-lig...

Why care about furniture surviving a move, when you can buy and build the same shit at your destination for cheap? And 'gift' the old to your follow renters, or just discard it?

Because wasting stuff is bad?

Well, in this case its not like you have a choice.

Still bad.

I don't care that much about surviving moves, I care about it being nice quality. And the nice ones will cost enough that I want to keep them.

I live next to one of the largest furniture manufacturers in America and going to the showroom says everything - the furniture is routinely broken there and it's rotated out as fast as they can make new models. we own one of their sets of couches from the late 1990s and it's finally giving up but the new stuff is built absolutely for profit margin and to not hold up at all.

My cheeky answer is always the bad furniture _has_ veneer :) having said that I have build a lot of "temporary" furniture (eg benches and tables) from 2x4 softwood and they're doing just fine 30ish years later.

I've got some things which have a thick veneer over the top of some other solid wood. It's pretty good quality. Many times better than the stuff that's like 1mm of wood over the top of cardboard hexagons.

Generally true, but one of my most successful mid-price purchases is a dresser in real walnut veneers over solid wood that is aging fantastically. It's just hard IMHO to know how thin or thick the veneer is.

>My biggest issue is that, like so many markets, there is a "missing middle" created by this downward price pressure.

I would wager that this is a proxy for the housing market. It's correlated with renting (majority) v/s buying (minority). And renters don't want the middle. That's pretty much how I view everything I buy. It's ephemeral.

>I think one reason Ikea is so popular is that they ride the upper end of the cheap segment.

Also, Ikea gets the mechanical designs right. I have been quite impressed with all ikea furniture that has folding contraptions. Their nyhamn futon used to be quite a steal at the old price of ~$200. The finnala sofa bed is also well made. And ikea tends to use removable fabric covers, which is also great. So ikea gets a lot of design right. The only bummer is their 1.5x price inflation since covid.

I generally agree with this. My wife and I recently (last year) decided to move to the UK from the US. We had a $10k Stickley sofa, a $7k custom-ordered rug, a lovely leather recliner the previous owners of the house left for us (they were going full van-life), Steelcase office chairs, etc.

We're now renting in London, and our furniture is almost exclusively Ikea, plus one mid-range sofa from John Lewis (£2000 or so). We view our furniture as mostly transient. All our expensive furniture is in storage in the US now, and will only come back out when we move home into a house we own and plan to stay in again.

>I would wager that this is a proxy for the housing market. It's correlated with renting (majority) v/s buying (minority). And renters don't want the middle. That's pretty much how I view everything I buy. It's ephemeral.

Interesting I've never thought of it that way, anyways here's a great podcast episode from 99 Percent Invisible on the "missing middle" in terms of housing.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-missing-middle/

Per https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/renters-vs-homeowne... ~2/3rds of households own vs. ~1/3rd rent. Not intuitive to me tbh either.

I guess we would have to look at the slice of the population that is active as far as furniture purchases and churn go. Presumably, owners don't shop for furniture that much once it's done. I have no data though.

Also, for most people, the difference in appearance between an IKEA nightstand and, say, an Eames one (or a custom-made one) is minimal. Like, there's a difference, but not a difference worth paying $x,000's for. Moreover, if a pet or a child destroys the table, you're out much less money, which is comforting.

Also, people are far more mobile these days. There's less of this sense of "building up a home" in this new generation - we aren't as attached to our things as our previous generations. There is also the culture of fast 'x' (not the movie, just a placeholder - like fast fashion, fast furniture, etc) and availability that people (millennials, gen z, gen alpha) desire these days.

IKEA tables are easier to disassemble and put back together (with varying degrees of success) for folks who move around. Alternatively, it's much cheaper to just buy a whole new set of IKEA furnitures than it is to replace furniture that costed 1k+.

>Moreover, if a pet or a child destroys the table, you're out much less money, which is comforting.

This cuts deeper the gouge my 5 year old put in my room and board solid maple credenza.

Maybe you could enhance the gouge to make it part of the design? That is the idea behind the Japanese practice of Kintsugi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

True, proper wood furniture have become more of a luxury as more and more utility is drawn from the likes of mass manufactured furniture like that of IKEA's.

I'm a weekend woodworker, and I have built a lot of things for my house like my kid's cradle, bed, our custom wardrobe, fancy looking shelves etc. However, even I think IKEA furniture has its place in my house. Our bed for example is IKEA MALM, our kitchen is made by IKEA. Some things are just not worth my time and effort and the cost of solid wood. IKEA quality is good enough and the price is right for them.

Recently, I have been bombarded with ads from some smallish furniture companies from Europe on Facebook. Dont know how the algorith decided on it, but it did. I see several companies that do few things and do them well, but not targeted at teh luxury buyer or vintage collector. They are targeted that a consumer looking for better than IKEA like you described. Perhaps, what you're looking for is coming already and you need to look deeper for now.

As a (hobbyist) woodworker myself, I’ll spend 4 weeks of my spare time (couple hours every couple days) making a piece and then feel like I saved myself 2000$ at the end of it, only to see the same thing on Etsy for 400$. Raw wood was probably 100-200$ alone.

The middle is out there, it’s just not in mass market stores. Honestly some of these sellers must not value their time like I do.

If you know the right things to ask the seller, you can end up with a fantastic piece for short money that will outlast you. Learning that language is tough though, but some time on woodworker YouTube will bridge the gap.

If you’re a handtool woodworker you can add to that the thousands of dollars in specialty tools you’ll inevitably acquire. Woodworking is insidious :-)

I do both. I have gear thing anyway, but thankfully I’m about done with the hand tool acquisition. I bought a subset of the Lie-Nielsen catalog that I use (after trying out some other brands and not being impressed) and now I don’t really have any hand tools to buy. I’d love to have an antique jointer, a nice wide planer, a nice sawstop cabinet saw, and an antique bandsaw… but I’ve got the cheaper or modern analogs. The sawstop job site saw was a minimum requirement, I need my fingers.

Lie-Nielsen and Veritas are the two brands of hand tools that will ruin you for others. Lie-Nielsen being the absolute best in recreation / refinement in traditional design, and Veritas answering the question of “what if we rethought the design and made it really well?”

Sawstop saw is a good call. IMO kickback is scarier than amputation, but most saws have decent mitigations against kickback and nobody but Sawstop is in the business of saving fingers.

I actually like the Lie-Nielsen planes much more than the Veritas planes, I can’t stand the Norris adjuster. I want to be able to change the aggressiveness of the shaving without knocking the blade out of alignment and about half the time I knocked it. Not a problem with the LN planes. I also like the LN steel more, I bought a bunch of the PN-V11, and with the exception of keeping the low angle jack as a special plane for curly grain (I have a 50 deg blade in it, it’s almost a scraper) I have been selling the others after getting the 4,5,7 LN ones. I would like a Veritas large rabbet plane for fielding panels, LN doesn’t make one.

I have the Veritas plow plane and it’s great, my favorite plane they make.

I prefer the Veritas a little myself, but the few times I’ve had hands on LN… well, they’ll get no disrespect from me. Both fantastic premium options IMO.

I have a block plane, #4 smoother, and a jointer that I was going to list for sale, do you want any of them?

used furniture is a good compromise there, though it's harder to get a consistent style when going that route. Part of Ikea furniture's appeal is also that it looks like other Ikea furniture.

So we purchased a couch three times: once from IKEA, again at a thrift shop, and once more from Rooms to Go (R2G).

R2G was, by far, the best option. I know that the sofa is "cheap" compared to what a "quality" couch would cost. (I paid $3200 for a three piece sectiona.) However, going into the showroom, having oodles of oodles of styles we could sit on, and giving the salesperson my card and having them take care of literally everything else (down to installation and placement) was amazing. The couch also looks great and is comfortable as hell.

The thrift shop couch was the second-best experience. Terrible selection, but we got lucky in finding a couch we liked. As it happens, the couch was an Ashley Furniture couch, which is kind of like R2G. We had to move it in ourselves, which was extremely annoying. But it is still standing and is still a great couch. (It's my office couch now!)

The IKEA couch was by far the worst. Buying the couch was easy, of course. Putting it together sucked, but whatever. The quality of the couch, though, was a disaster. Super lumpy seats within months of use, color stains discolored the couch permanently, even after cleaning, looseness, etc. I wouldn't buy couches from them again.

That said, we have tables from them that are still great. So maybe IKEA for small furniture you don't care about is the move.

I almost bought an IKEA couch without trying it,but I managed to buy one at a local store for not much more. A few weeks later I found my self at IKEA and tried out the couch. I was so glad I didn't buy it, all of them were so uncomfortable.

I got my sofabed from Ikea. It looks good to me and is an absolute joy to lie on. The few guests that have slept on it gave 5/5 reviews, firm feel and well slept.

Granted, it's just six months old so I don't know yet how it'll hold up. But I'm very happy this far.

I live on the west coast, and sometimes visit family in the Midwest. The quality and quantity of used furniture available over there is so much better.

I attribute this to much of California only becoming as densely populated as it is (which is to say, not) after around the 1950s. While there are families who have lived here for five or more generations, they’re by far the exception rather than the norm. The overwhelming majority of people who are here have comparatively shallow roots, didn’t bring furniture with them when they came here, and even if they have access to good furniture from elsewhere, it’s cheap and good enough to go to ikea.

Dealing with bed bugs and other pests has made me apprehensive about purchasing used furniture. It's a shame because you can usually find great deals on FB Marketplace, Craigslist, Kijiji etc.

Solution to this is to leave it in a quarantine room for up to 5 months (if you have the space).

Though and I say this anecdotally, when I moved back to the States I ended up refurnishing most of my house using street finds. We're talking like 10 different furniture finds include a futon frame (we bought a new mattress). Only 1 of those was upolsteres but was in great condition.

No bed bugs, I got lucky.

Where is it a cost-saving solution to pay for a quarantine room that will be unused for other purposes for up to 5 months, all so you can save a few hundred dollars by buying used furniture?

It's not unless you've got the space, I have a shed I put stuff in and let anything on it starve to death. You have to plan on for it

Bed bugs can go for ages without feeding; the only real way to kill them en masse is extreme heat—e.g. the dryer. There are services that come and seal your house up and then essentially pump 125F heat into it, to kill the bedbugs (bugs @ 120F, eggs @ 125F). If suppose if your shed gets to ~125F in the summer, should be good. Point being: heat > time-since-last-meal for bedbugs. (unfortunately I am speaking from experience)

Edit/addendum: The bed-bug-sniffing-dog, while a very good boy, is a total scam.

Thank you for saying it. Bed bugs can go literally three years without eating. Using the mixed-toxin (different bedbug poison for each treatment, minimum 2 treatments) approach usually works, but the only way to definitely kill existing bugs and eggs is to get every part of an object to over 125f. AFAIK, 125f is the instant-death point. That is, any bug or egg the hits 125f at all is dead. Otoh, 113f requires 90 minutes of exposure before the bugs are killed, and the eggs require 118f for 90 minutes.

One of the things that undermines the used furniture market for higher-end furniture is storage. Larger pieces often get stored somewhere for a period before they're sold, but unlike veneered MDF, solid wood pieces are vulnerable to get warped by rapid changes in moisture, particularly if they get temporarily stored in non-climate-controlled storage facilities. I wonder if there's a business opportunity for some kind of efficient middleman that takes high end furniture off people's hands and stores it properly while facilitating resale.

There are all sorts of people who run small businesses like this, who often sell on craigslist and a shopify store. I bought one in his storage warehouse, nice guy.

This has been how I've largely addressed the missing middle issue for myself— I'm not up for $2000+ pieces, but when I want to do better than flat-pack trash, getting something for $300-500 second hand seems like a solid way to go.

You can definitely find nice stuff made out of maple on Facebook marketplace if you're patient.

> There's very little in between, even if I'm willing to pay a bit more for something a bit nicer.

Same has happened in clothing. To get something other than cheap crap made out of synthetic fibers, you now have to go premium. Are people really less discerning than they used to be? Has the average purchasing power declined? Or is the problem that people don't want to commit to something that lasts for years, because they fear their taste may change?

People used to spend a lot more, per item, on clothing. The real culprit in this case is that we have become accustomed to things being cheap.

We have also come to accept wildly poor standards for clothing construction because of our disconnect between expense and quality. Can you imagine brushing off those little snags you get in your tshirts after one wash as "just how these things are"if you had paid the real modern (local labor) cost for them? As a sewist I would estimate that the labor and materials cost for one well-made, good material t-shirt would be at least $45 [0] before even accounting for profit margin, yet people grumble at paying $20 for slave labor cotton blended with plastic made at the hands of an overworked, underpaid sweatshop worker. Our ability to source clothing so cheaply coupled with our lack of direct interaction with the making and maintenance of them has lowered our expectations in a race to the bottom.

[0] back of napkin math - i might be able to find a decent knit cotton with some veneer of ethical sourcing at a rock-bottom price of $10-12 per yard (in practice F to doubt). Assuming a pittance for the thread (and ignoring the upstart costs for acquiring a sewing machine), I would peg my skillset at a value of $35-50 per hour given my experience based on the rates of similarly skilled artisans in the US.

The issue is that even if you pay well above $50 there's no guarantee that the t-shirt will actually be any good after 10 washes. I have two t-shirts from 15 years ago that are still going strong. Whatever I buy these days becomes 'home' t-shirt fairly quickly.

Well that also goes to diminished purchasing power

The clothing market for the middle seems to have shrunk. Massdrop was pretty successful in offering the middle, until they pivoted. I bought of lot of good quality interesting stuff from massdrop back in the day.

Learning how to sew is really handy for this. You will pay more on materials than you would for the absolute cheapest clothes you can find, but the quality will be on par with much more expensive clothes.

Being able to sew means you can also repair a lot of your older clothing and you can tailor newly purchased clothes to fit better.

people pay more attention to the price than the quality or quantity, so when costs go up, manufacturers must keep the price the same and provide worse or less

shrinkflation is another result of this

I was recently looking for a shelving unit for vinyl records. The Ikea solution was 100$. Next step up were 1000$ home-made units on Etsy. In the end, I went with Ikea. Something in the middle would have been nice.

Anyone in the US (without a physical disability) can DIY a shelving unit for vinyl records better than IKEA for well less than $1000 USD. Takes a little time, portable power tools and box level, a few fasteners from online/DIY stores and access to premium lumber. Easy and cheap access to quality lumber in North America is one of our strong points, might as well take advantage of it. Helps if the lumber supplier does cuts and planing, worth the drive to find one. Pride of accomplishment comes for free.

The know-how to do this is somewhat of a lost art with the newer generation of adults.

It really isn't. As long as you can watch YouTube and maintain the confidence to ruin some material while you're learning, it isn't difficult to pick up.

And once I tell that to whichever zoomers or younger person I'm talking to (this talk usually happens while we're at whichever Home Depot-analogous store is physically closest to their home, while I'm getting them set up with a Starter Toolbox), they usually take to it just fine.

Probably just a bias. The generation I speak of would not be found anywhere near a Home Depot or hardware store.

I would expect to pay $40 at most for a nightstand, and a quick look at Amazon confirms my guess. I would also expect it to last decades, and if it failed, to fail in one of a few very predictable ways(Mostly fasteners stripping out of sawdustboard) which can be both repaired, and avoided at the design stage for not much extra money.

I've never really experienced this "bad furniture" phenomena. Maybe because I have more thrift store than new cheap furniture, but I also wonder if style doesn't have to do with it.

I mostly go for the fake rustic look, but I suspect more minimalist or Bauhaus stuff has more issues, since those styles are almost specifically meant to say "Look at the great material we use, this thing would totally fall apart if we took shortcuts".

I also tend to go for the really cheap stuff, which I suspect might be more reliable than what is sold as mid range now. I have some drawers in the front room that are literally nonwoven fabric drawers, in a metal frame. I'm not sure what the failure mode would be other than directly taking a hard hit, it doesn't really have any of the weak points I'm used to seeing.

But the quality of Ikea products is worse than was 10-15 years ago. I actually bought a few items last year to replace the same furniture I bought in 2010. The veneer is now so much thinner (it seems as thin as a cigarette paper) it breaks and rips after just a few months. Without wood glue everything is wobbly. Terrible - but still slightly better than other cheap furniture.

I know this is extreme and not available to everyone, but I'm just making my own furniture because of the reasons you cite.

Yes I have the room, money and a little time to build my own workshop, but really, it's 100% more satisfying, attractive and much much cheaper to DIY.

It's really turned into quite the passion for me. Once I pay off me house I'd think about investing more time into it.

I wonder if the missing middle comes from plywood / mdf just being more predictable than wooden boards so it's easier to automate / optimize manufacturing on.

So one step up from that becomes "real wood" and suddenly you need a human spending a ton of time paying attention to the grain, and idiosyncrasies of the wood etc. Labor costs shoot through the roof for even relatively simple furniture

Plywood furniture is garbage. Plywood cabinets, ok there is a good use for the material. It’s just a shortcut for not having to account for wood movement, but the veneer they put on modern plywood can be scraped through by looking at it wrong. It’s undersized (3/4” is not 3/4” thick) to save money, it’s only got a couple layers, and half the time the middle layer looks like pressed sawdust. Baltic Birch is the only decent stuff, but the cost of it is prohibitive.

The stores you mentioned, even when the furniture is $3000, is made a step up from IKEA in that it’s not pressboard, but it’s probably veneered or made to look “distressed” and dyed as a way to hide the wood it’s made from. You’ll see screws instead of mortise and tenon joints, you’ll see comically obvious grain mismatches, the stuff is just sloppy.

Find a local woodworker, pick timeless styles and get it made from a wood that isn’t that expensive but is beautiful and easy to work like cherry. It will cost something similar to what crate and barrel charges, and you’ll have it in 50 years.

This is a great suggestion. I found a woodworker locally and paid $500/end table and $3000 for a dining room table, all solid walnut. Absolutely heirloom quality, my kids will inherit these pieces if their aren’t careful.

There is a section in one of my furniture plan books that says this furniture will be so strong and well made, your kids will never be able to break it down to get it in the trash, so they’ll keep it for your grandkids that will actually appreciate it :)

There are furniture stores that cater to that missing middle. Places that sell solid oak furniture. Places that sell quality Amish furniture. Sure, it's not IKEA cheap, but it's also not heirloom expensive.

You just have to know where to look. And what to look for.

> even if I'm willing to pay a bit more for something a bit nicer.

I can easily find a brand new Amish-made dining room table in my area - with same-day delivery - for under $2000.

I try to buy old stuff at thrift shops. You can get nice solid wood pieces pretty cheap.

Just buy used quality stuff, find local smaller woodworkers that are getting established, etc...

If you bought IKEA you are already part of the problem. Real furniture IS expensive and worth it considering you use it almost everyday.

Solid wood is an absolute nightmare to move. And I've found that most stuff from IKEA lasts quite a long time.

Solid wood furniture designed to be dismantled and reassembled easily is not a nightmare to move. In fact it is easier than moving cheaper furniture whose integrity is compromised with each dismantle/reassemble cycle, and thus is moved whole. It’s a design problem, not a materials problem.

And the well-designed easily-movable solid wood furniture will be fought over by your great-grandkids.

> And the well-designed easily-movable solid wood furniture will be fought over by your great-grandkids.

It won't for the exact dame reason why we do not fight for grandmas furniture - the style just looks old.

I've never seen this. It's always been glued and nailed together.

It absolutely exists.

It's a cultural thing, beyond the merely "it will last longer", just like dressing good. You don't do it for others so much as for yourself and the respect you afford yourself. But yes, there is a baseline level of wealth implied in not moving all the time.

How long is "quite" in this reference. I've got ikea crap which is falling apart and its only ever held towels and linen, not even 5 years.

I’ve got some of the malm draws that have been in use for 15 years now and they still look fine.

Most of my stuff is from ikea and nothing has failed yet, but I specifically select stuff that seems sturdy which most of it is.

That might be problem, I didnt choose these.

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