The Democratization of Taste in Everyday Life
My wife loves IKEA. She is counting down the days until the first IKEA store in Minneapolis-St. Paul opens near the Mall of America and is actually considering taking time off work to spend a full day there shopping once it's up and running. Like I said, she loves IKEA.
Eric Gibson has a piece on the megastore at OpinionJournal.com, where he discusses the controversy surrounding a planned IKEA store in Brooklyn and explains why IKEA is good for consumers, good for democracy, and good for America:
IKEA does for the home what Julia Child did for the kitchen--and what Martha Stewart, later, did for home crafts. It's possible to walk into an IKEA store thinking that interior decoration is little more than cinder blocks and orange crates and leave with a bedroom, living room or kitchen worthy of the toniest shelter magazine. Goodbye college dorm, hello Museum of Modern Art--an instant upgrade.
In part, IKEA does this by marrying two seemingly irreconcilable worlds: economy and high design. The consumer no longer has to choose between the unattractive and cheap, on the one hand, and the good-looking and dear. You can buy a sofa for as little as $200, but it looks as good as the top-of-the-line model that retails for just under $1,000. That you have to assemble everything when you get home doesn't seem to deter people, perhaps because it helps keep prices down.
IKEA's other secret is to take the mystery out of home decoration by walking you through it step-by-step, like Julia Child with a recipe. The catalogs have pictures of products and ensembles, but to really understand the genius of IKEA you have to go to one of their stores. The showroom is on one floor, the purchasing area on another. You follow a winding pathway through the showroom, passing all manner of installations--bedroom, kitchen, living room, office--each aimed at helping you determine what best meets your needs and, more important, what seems to go with what. It is a series of seminar rooms for those of us who did not grow up with Mies van der Rohe or Alvar Aalto in the family.
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