There was a time when eating some meatballs didn’t make you want to buy a Billy shelf. Thirty years, in fact. It was on May 6, 1996, when the Ikea mothership landed among us and the extraordinary shockwave was immediate. It was easy, clean, young, and cheap. And there were (in theory) many possibilities. Some people went to Ikea in those early days just to get ideas. They entered the stores and left without buying anything, with their eyes and minds full of ideas. That leaving without buying didn’t last long. One fact: 6% of Catalans born in these three decades were conceived in Ikea beds. If that impresses you, and returning to the topic of the meatballs from the Swedish restaurant inside the premises, you should also know that 8.7 million meatballs have been served and eaten, so that if you stacked one meatball on top of another (and on another, and another) you could build a tower 60 kilometers high.
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In years, if not months, La Garriga would become our Detroit – once an industrial powerhouse, now a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and MAGA voters – almost our zero zone for furniture. You can still go to La Garriga to buy furniture, of course, just as you can take your kids to the merry-go-rounds. Let’s be clear: going to Ikea is like Port Aventura, Tinder, Primavera Sound, the Monopoly game of decoration.
6% of Catalans born since 1996 were conceived in Ikea beds
It’s not about romanticizing furniture shopping of the past because, long before Backrooms, entering a furniture store was a strange experience. A kind of Noah’s Ark: there was everything, yes, but only two (or four) specimens of each species gathered in groups. Inside, it was known that there were beings who seemed to live there. We called them salespeople. Someone who wanted your money, but presumably not at any price. Upon entering, a bell rang on their fabric that warned them, like spiders. If they were attending to other people, they remained calm but were weighing and measuring you. Sizing you up. Lookers or buyers. Fresh or tired. Cash or installments. They let us wander through sofas, beds, lamps, and desks from nobody’s homes, aspirational, until the lion jumped on us and there was nothing to do. They asked, fell silent thoughtfully at our answer, made us sit down and while drawing, adding and subtracting, crafted that piece for life because all happy dining rooms looked alike, but all unhappy dining rooms were unhappy in their own way.
The message to redecorate your life worked. Boy, did it work. Wildly. That’s why being at Ikea is like being at home. At your friends’ house, any house, and anyone’s house. If it weren’t for that black and alien monolith that still reigns in your parents’ house, you would believe that, since the beginning of time, there was only one world and that world was Ikea.
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It’s important to come with comfortable shoes because Ikea is exhausting. Maybe it’s because you have to follow a preset route, relieved by two or three shortcuts that seem more like hamster traps than anything else. Or maybe the people tire you out, walking among them, realizing you see so many – like you, believing they are different – desperate to find things, decorate their life, make it practical and functional. Or it’s exhausting to know that the magic never reaches home: it stays in the trunk of your car or maybe doesn’t even leave the store. The arc from your desire to enjoy it. The disappointing certainty that this time won’t be enough either. Maybe that’s what tires you the most.
Leg and calf fatigue is usually deceived by an unexpected willingness to buy sofas and armchairs and, in extreme cases, beds and futons. But you can’t sit or lie down for long without the Ikettes suspecting. Another option is to enter the department where one of them makes you a custom piece of furniture. While that happens, you’re sitting, far from suspicion and looking at a screen that isn’t your phone. I, in the six hours I’ve already been here, have designed a dining room, a triplets’ bedroom, and a kitchen. I think the designer has figured me out because the dishwasher space has already been drawn with bad attitude.
I pass for the fifth time by the Swedish cafeteria, Click & Collect department, the melancholic “Last units,” where those pieces that disappear from their range forever are shown and which has something of when, at five in the morning, they turn on the lights in the club and those left look at each other with disgust and pity. Ikea’s purpose wasn’t bad. To change our environment every so often and break with the idea of forever lives. What they didn’t count on is that now you can change furniture, but you can’t have a home.
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