I don't think that the good stuff is popular, though, and it certainly isn't highlighted. When a durable (often secretly classic) design slips in, it doesn't last more than a few years. The price is usually too high and it's usually too heavy (for their audience, not for me.)
I've still got some really elementally designed and sturdy mounted shelves from them that I've carried from place to place, and installed and removed many times, for the past 30 years. They were probably discontinued 28 years ago; I couldn't find them in back catalogs and AI couldn't even help. I would have started to doubt that I got them from IKEA except that I have one set of components that is still in the packaging. It's simple steel and simple wood, and the wood (IKEA pretending like a plain flat wooden board is a product) is easily replaceable.
I have to be honest, I don't really value furniture that is heavy for the sake of it. I like hippy-futons, simple wooden tables with drawers and removable legs, transformer chairs*, etc. Being able to be disassembled and easily moved or stored is something I value, and being able to be flattened against a wall so the room can be temporarily reconfigured (a requirement for colonial US furniture) is ideal (double drop-leaf tables are wonderful.) Wood and steel are durable, and simple designs with standard hardware are easily reparable.
[*] https://www.core77.com/posts/58815/Different-Design-Approach...
But then I noticed they had a much better series called the Hemnes made with actual solid wood shelves and legs so you can route power cords and clean under them. Nice.
So instead of a bunch of Billy's for $70 each I ended up with a bunch of Hemnes' for $350 each. We'll see if it's worth it when they get delivered tomorrow.
Sadly, I don't know if it's worth trying to keep them at this point, because they replaced the previously decently durable wood veneer surfaces with glued on wood-pattern paper wraps (https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/ikea-furniture-inflation...). It's lead to me having a mix of old ones that still look like the day I put them together and new ones where all the corners are already visibly raveling from the wear of a single move.
Applying care and some wood glue during construction will yield a very solid product for years to come. And you have to have a little bit of taste and discretion when buying, as Ikea indeed has a wide range of quality among their items. Any item that has real wood will definitely last.
Sure, you could probably punch through the desk surface with a screwdriver. But within normal use it holds up great
I couldn’t justify the cost of the furniture I really want. So off to IKEA I go!
And if you have a bit of skill at choosing and assembling IKEA furniture, then you can customise things on the cheap so at least it can look the way you want.
I think most of America’s options are the big warehouse furniture places or an ikea if it near by, they do delivery well.
Some do it with grace, some of us with a bit of duct tape. Others, not at all.
The big wardrobes? They are the worst combination of impossibly heavy, awkward to disassemble and expensive to repurchase - best bet is to sell to the next occupant. On the other hand I have a solid table and chairs and they flat pack and reassemble perfectly. Same with bed frames. Shelving units go straight in the van. I wish the office desktops had metal threaded inserts for the legs instead of nylon, but otherwise also have moved several times and no real issue.
That, and apart from the tiny unfortunate period during which everything had to be leaded or mixed with uranium, your traditional furniture will degrade gracefully over time and not poison your entire family. Ikea-like (not just Ikea) furniture is already full of toxic chemicals.
You have to go back to the 30s and earlier before you get furniture that will stand up like that, and making that furniture new today would cost more than almost anyone could afford.
Why would I want to buy furniture that lasts centuries? I'll be dead in a few decades and exactly nobody would be lusting after a couch with decades of my flatulence trapped inside it.
As for durability, the average age bit of IKEA furniture is old enough to vote.
That's true, but once you move it around and/or disassemble it it gets very easily damaged, which prevents second-hand use.
> Why would I want to buy furniture that lasts centuries?
Well it's not all just a matter of personal taste. The ecological lifecycle of massive wood kept over generation is much better than throwaway furniture. Very egoistically, you may want to live in a society that values preserving an inhabitable planet. Alternatively, you may appreciate that some people do and that being stuck with the same furniture (among other arrangements) is a small price to pay.
As for "ecological lifecycle", that's a more complex question than can be expressed in a few paragraphs because one needs to understand what timber is and where it comes from. As well as how it is used.
If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat, since the deforestation that actually matters, that of untouched virgin forest, is mostly to produce what ends up on your plate. Mostly beef, but also oil crops etc. The timber in your furniture comes from managed forests. Essentially crops. Of which there is no shortage.
However, there is a shortage of virgin forest. In Europe genuinely untouched forest, which is the kind that matters for biodiversity, is somewhere in the region of 2%. Which is why most Europeans will never see actual virgin forest during their lifetime. The thing they think of as forest is managed plantation with low biological diversity.
(The situation in the US isn't nearly as bad as in Europe. Alaska has mostly virgin forest for instance)
This is why countering deforestation isn't about "just planting trees". If it were about that we wouldn't have a problem because we plant orders of magnitude more trees than we fell in virgin forests. In the US alone about 1.2-1.3 billion seedlings are planted yearly during the planting season. To maintain an equilibrium.
Where I live he amount timber, by volume, has tripled in the past century. The problem isn't that we have too few trees - it is that we are behind on managing their age distribution. 40-45% of the forest where I live is harvest ready. About 10-15% of it is overdue.
(And we haven't even touched on recycling, and the amount of recycled materials found in the products of IKEA and others. Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood)
Anecdata: about half of secondhand IKEA-like furniture i get my hands on is somewhat severely damaged, and about a quarter overall i just throw away. Stats may be different elsewhere, but even talking to other local skippers and ressourcerie workers here in France, the common knowledge is that unless you get it in perfect mint condition, there's no point or resale value in chipboard/plywood furniture.
(this is not just a furniture problem, about 90% of electronics entering a ressourcerie will just end up in the recycling bin because repairing it takes skills, time and resources for very little commercial resale value)
> If this genuinely is a worry of yours then I'd be more worried about what to eat
Good point, i'm not claiming simply stopping to buy IKEA-like products is going to save the planet. There's much much more to do.
> The problem isn't that we have too few trees
I agree overall, although it's often locally wrong: industrial agriculture is displacing a lot of forests and woods which negatively affects the water cycle (a different issue). Here in France deforestation is a real problem and simply keeping concentrated patches of mono-species woods (that you blank cut every X years) isn't helping nature thrive.
> Of course, if one has romantic notions of solid wood furniture then one would most likely sneer at products made from recycled wood
I have conflicting feelings about it. I'm of course very much pro-recycling as a concept. However the current implementation of taking chemical-filled products and chemical-bathing them to produce more chemical-filled products (eg. plastics or chipboard) doesn't exactly sound eco-friendly.
In fact, i'm not even romantic about massive wood furniture. I've more than once almost broke my back on them in staircases, and the price new is crazy. I'd say half of my furniture is massive and half is Ikea/Conforama: 0% has been bought from the original store, 50% has been bought secondhand (the rest found/donated) and no single item cost more than 20€. I don't have bad feelings for my Ikea-style furniture (love my 2 Ikea GNEDBY for the books), i just don't think this industrial production and throwaway-furniture culture is something we should aim for as a society because it's not sustainable.