Dear Fiona
My home is largely furnished with Ikea furniture – sofa, rugs, wardrobes, bookcases. I like it all, that’s why I chose it. But recently, one of my friends remarked on what a bold move it was not to have customised any of it. I’m aware that ‘bold’ isn’t necessarily a compliment in this context – and I started looking more closely at her house and realised that she’s also got quite a lot of Ikea furniture – only, it’s almost all unrecognisable.
I’ve done further research and discovered the amount of space on the Internet that is given over to ‘Ikea hacks’, how popular customising furniture is in general – and read one of your articles where you recommended adding a trim or a braid to ready-made curtains. What is it with customisation? And is it wrong not to be doing it? My furniture’s origins being recognisable had never bothered me, until now. Actually, it still doesn’t – but should it? Interiors are a kind of new interest for me – or rather, they’re increasingly becoming more interesting to me.
Thanks so much,
Love,
As It Comes XX
Dear As It Comes,
What a lot to think about – as I gaze at my Ikea kitchen cabinets which I’ve painted and topped with a custom worktop, and at a set of Ikea filing cabinets that I have not changed at all (unless you count losing the keys.) I’m glad that interiors are becoming more interesting to you: how people live is a source of endless fascination to me, and I strongly believe that the environments we create for ourselves have the capacity to bring huge amounts of joy, and help us connect with other people – although, alongside that comes occasional uncertainty.
Which leads onto your quandary. I don’t know if you’ve read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich? It’s one of his shorter novels – a novella really – involving curtains, specifically a set of curtains that were going to aid our titular hero conform to the particularities of 19th-century St. Petersburg society. Unfortunately, while fitting them, he fell and injured himself – an injury that proved terminal. Some see it as a cautionary tale, inferring that his mistake was in endeavouring to decorate the same way as everybody else (or maybe in attempting to hang his own curtains.) Others understand it as a critique of the tyranny of bourgeois niceties. Either way, the great existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about the importance of not conforming blindly to the crowd’s judgement – which he related to inauthenticity. The best interiors are popularly agreed to be autobiographical, i.e. authenticity is what we should be aiming for. The question, really, is whether we conform by customising furniture – or ‘boldly’ leaving it as it is? And perhaps here we should leave Tolstoy and Sartre behind for a moment and instead look at why it is that people do decide to make changes to furniture (and curtains.)
Let’s start with the purpose of furniture – which at its most fundamental is to support such human activities as sitting, eating, storing items, and sleeping. If we all put function before form we’d possibly all be very content with matching generic furniture –but some people think about form quite a lot. And so, reaching back through the ages, some furniture began to reflect the fashions and architectural style of its time, and the making of it evolved into a valued craft, and that furniture, inevitably, became expensive, and aspirational, and today some of it’s worth thousands of pounds – whether a Boulle cabinet, an original Eileen Gray Bibendum Chair, or anything else that features in the collection of the V&A’s furniture department or comes from from David Gill Gallery. Few (if any) customise those pieces incidentally – because to do so would be to devalue them. (Also, few are fortunate enough to own them.)
On the other hand, we’ve all got Ikea furniture – and when I say ‘we all’ I mean you, me, my House & Garden colleagues, the House & Garden Top 100 interior designers – indeed, even the Prince and Princess of Wales are rumoured to have the occasional piece of Ikea in their Kensington Palace apartment (I can’t tell you which of them assembled it, though if I were asked to hazard a guess, my money’s on Kate.) Of course, one of the major reasons that Ikea is so universal is because the business model is such that it can be sold comparatively cheaply – meaning it’s become the default answer to everybody’s most basic needing someone to sit/ eat/ store something/ sleep. And that’s also why people feel that they can change it; the value is sufficiently low for it to be a low-risk exercise. What’s more, in changing it, there is possibility that value will be added for the person doing the customisation, for the furniture will become either more useful, or more beautiful, or even both.
Take a simple Ikea wardrobe. Scrolling through the Ikea Hackers website (you’ve doubtlessly come across it on your journey around the Internet – but for anyone who hasn’t, it’s an addictive rabbit hole of a fan account that accepts nominations from those who have tweaked an Ikea model in a manner that is not covered in the instruction manual) I was alerted to the person who managed to turn their Pax unit into a walk-in-wardrobe of Narnia-ish impressiveness by installing it over an existing storage space, and presumably not adding its entire back. In other words, he took Ikea’s design, and made it work better for him than the original would have done – because Ikea are designing for everyman, rather than him specifically (which is how the prices stay low). Lulu Lytle of Soane also has an Ikea wardrobe – it’s in her son’s bedroom, and she has altered it by giving it curtains instead of doors, which I imagine softens its presence. I painted my kitchen cabinets for similar reasons – I wanted a more pigmented, painterly finish, which Edward Bulmer Natural Paint delivers, and now the cupboards match the walls instead of there being a two-tone effect. It’s not that I’m trying to disguise the cabinets being from Ikea, I just wanted them in a finish that Ikea don’t do.
Others might paint a piece of furniture to increase its decorative appeal (I planned to do just that with some Billy bookcases, and even took a course in it - but they remained off-the-shelf white for the whole twelve years I owned them) – and that is why I might also advocate for adding a trim to curtains. Very simply, I like trims, and I think other people do as well. Going back to Ikea Hackers, there are also those who might want to prolong the life of, say, a trundle bed that had been in a children’s room and used for sleepovers, by reconfiguring the main component parts into a double bed because the child is now a near 6-foot tall teenager, using a unifying upholstered headboard – which I imagine to be a cost-saving exercise, too. And all these instances seem, to me, pretty valid reasons for customising any furniture (excepting the aforementioned Boulle, and modern classics, etc.)
Going further, it’s true that Ikea furniture can become unrecognisable – and that might be because someone has recognised the beginnings of something else in an ordinary cabinet, and built on it – see Lucia van der Post’s kitchen dresser. And with this are those who derive genuine enjoyment from the challenge. It’s a variation on Lego, I suppose, for grown-ups, but with a greater sense of purpose. Take the transformation of a Billy bookcase into a home bar, by way of 3 Billy bookcases, 3 Lommarp cabinets, 3 Billy extensions, a tin of pink paint, and some brass wall sconces. It’s not an altogether inexpensive list of ingredients, coming in at almost £2000 by my reckoning – but it’s an impressive build. Is it also a way of showing individualism? Maybe. Is individualism the same as authenticity?
Oh look, we’re back to Sartre - and the possibly related psychological phenomenon that is the Need for Uniqueness index (NfU for short), a recognised spectrum of personality trait. Simply, it is the fact that some people feel the need to stand out as being different, more than others do. Some are compelled to dye their hair purple; others go through their entire lives their natural colour, while in between are plenty who go a shade or two lighter, and have straightening treatments, for reasons of aesthetics. And that applies to interiors, too. For some, transforming a piece of Ikea furniture into something that is no longer recognisable as what it once was is entirely authentic to them – but, by the same premise, so is living with un-customised Ikea furniture absolutely authentic to others. Both camps, and everything in the middle, have their tribes, meaning every approach can be read as conforming, and not conforming, via customising furniture, or not. The clue to surviving while hanging curtains, unlike Ivan Ilych, is to have the inner strength not to bend yourself in a direction you don’t want to go in – at least, that is my take on the tale. But that’s not to say that you can’t experiment, and, as your interest in interiors grow, you may find that decoratively painting an Ikea table, or changing the hardware on some wardrobes, takes on a new appeal.
But it might not, and that’s fine too, because living with unmodified Ikea furniture is absolutely okay. The great Emma Burns, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, has got Ikea lights in her book barn, and she has not tweaked them. Beata Heuman had a Pax wardrobe in her former apartment – one of the ones with mirrored doors – and she did not alter that. What’s more, it’s feasible that the last laugh is on those who don’t favour customisation: Ikea might be cheap, but much of it is also extraordinarily well-designed. I mentioned the V&A Furniture collection; it actually contains 17 pieces by Ikea, including a 1994 folding bookcase and a 1996 chair – alongside, good quality vintage Ikea pieces have recently realised surprisingly high prices at auction. But then, so might that pink bar, one day.
In summation: hold on to what’s authentic to you – and what brings you joy.
With love,
Fiona XX
