Lord Gonchar

I made the mistake of returning to an Ikea store today (yesterday, by the posting date on this). We need some curtains and while we’re not sure what we want, we still haven’t seen it and thought maybe we’d get lucky at Ikea and maybe find some other things in the process. My wife digs Ikea. I think Ikea is lame. We left with a wok (yay stir fry!) and two cheap plastic bins my son can put his overflowing lego collection in. It was a total waste of my time and I now know why I only need to visit an Ikea every 4 or 5 years.

I know Ikea stores are a fresh and new idea for a lot of people, but Pittsburgh had one of the first. Way back when I was a kid and didn’t care a bit about home goods, the hillfolk of western PA were getting dumb little chairs and tables at Ikea. The first time I actually stepped foot into one was when we moved back to Pittsburgh in 2004. My wife’s hotel was across the highway from it and we lived like 10 minutes away. Basically, it was quick local shopping for us that people would drive hours to visit – go figure.

I initially thought it was the best place in the world. But I noticed that the more I returned the less enthused I was about what they had. It lost its luster a little more with each visit. We’ve owned a few things from Ikea. We had some chairs that were fine. We gave them away after a couple of years because we really didn’t need them any more. We had some neat big white curtain thingies that we used in front of our sliding glass door. We had a funky-sized artowrk thingy that the movers broke when we came to Dayton. My daughter’s side table in her bedroom as I type this came from Ikea and it does what it does.

In fact, that’s the thing about Ikea – their shit is fine. If you just need to slap together a little table and toss it in the corner, it’s fine. Need a shelf somewhere? Stop at Ikea, their shelves are just fine.

So my wife got me to drive to the Cincy Ikea that opened in late 2008 or something like that. Long enough ago to be established but recent enough to still be ‘new’ and an attraction for people.

I can say that the place offers me next to nothing. In general, I don’t think their furniture is nice. It’s plasticky. Not necessarily literally (although sometimes) but in a more general way. If I was allowed one adjective to describe the furniture in Ikea, I’d choose plasticky. (and I’d spell it like that too) Every thing has a shiny, plastic, retro-modern look to it – even wood items. It’s not that it necessarily looks cheap, it just doesn’t look right. It looks like dollhouse furniture or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it or find the right words to get close. It’s off.

Which is fine when you’re finding something significantly cheaper than you can elsewhere – like the aforementioned fabrics, little sidetables and one-off shelves. That’s the one place Ikea excels…or at least makes some sense to me.

But it just feels like as far a big things go, you can do much better for “same ballpark” prices at any number of furniture stores…and the things generally will have nice finishes that don’t look so plasticky…and aesthetic design, not just functional design.

Speaking of design, the style just screams college dorm room chic to me. Again, I use that for lack of a better term, but it’s like a manufactured, fake sophistication – fauxphistication (can I trademark that?). I can’t imagine furnishing my house with the stuff at Ikea (and I mean in any significant way, remember, I have some of this crap in the corners around here too) beyond the age of 25…30 if I’m generous and definitely at 25 (or less) if you’re in a relationship and cohabitating.

I dunno, it just doesn’t do it for me on any level. I’m less enthused everytime I visit a store. I suspect the same happens to their products in the house (again referring to big things – like doing a room in all Ikea crap). Like at first it’s a shiny and sleek and everyday it starts to look a little plastickier (oh yeah, I went there with the spelling) and a little less shiny until you hate it and realize you bought weird fucking Swedish shit for your house.

I’m sure there’s someone going to read this who swears by the place and has an Ikea house that will be sure to let me know how nice their stuff is. That’s fine. To each their own. It’s certainly not for me, so maybe it’s for you.

Today’s visit was a special treat though because of the extra super special Sunday morning crowd. It was the stop-and-gawk theme park mentality taken to the max. And yes, I realize that’s kinda what you do in a furniture store – stop and look. But it was a wonderful mix of yokels from the southern Ohio, Southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky area who were amazed at the shiny visions of plasticky furniture that was “surely from the fyooture” and wannabee hipsters and intellectuals who took it way too seriously and discussed extra-loudly why this piece worked and why it would work in whatever area of their swank pad needed this piece. It was like the fucking Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen so many Ikea-goers with the checklists and tiny mini-golf pencils going around scribbling whatever it was you scribble on those little pieces of paper. My daughter and I picked up a paper/pencil combo about halfway through and kept imaginary mini-golf scores with it…whenever we weren’t pretending a cobra was jumping out of everything that could be opened and striking when we opened it.

Turns out we didn’t find any curtains and their selection of artwork/stuff for the wall was lame at best. I’m convinced at least 50% of it was the same stuff I saw during my last visit to the Pittsburgh store 4 years ago.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – the stupid-ass product names. Arrrgh! I’m convinced it’s just abstract word association with ‘modern’ misspellings. For example, let’s pretend we need to give a clock a product name. Hmmm. Clock. Clocks keep time. Units for measuring time. Hours. Days. Minutes. Years. Decades! Now a funky modern misspelling and voila!

The clock product name is Dekad.

It really feels that shallow and manufactured most of the time….just like the furniture!

(yes, I understand the names are usually Swedish words that are just literal translations or adjectives describing preferred qualities of the product, but’s it’s not cutesy and SKÄRPT – it’s silly and OMTÖCKNAD.)

Whatever. Your mileage will vary to be sure. I’m not a fan of the place and, by my estimation, won’t step foot in another Ikea store until 2014 or so.