The Hog household was blessed with the new IKEA catalogue the other day. I flip through it wistfully in the bathroom. Are you familiar with IKEA? A wonderful, magical place...It's a furniture store. Well, more a sort of general household goods store, really. A Swedish firm, it has stores all around the world: in Finland, in the Czech Republic, in Baltimore and in College Park, Maryland, and, mirabile dictu, right here in the Seattleland area. The hallmarks of IKEA, I suppose, are low cost, lots of wood, bizarre product names, occasionally bizarre designs, and did I mention wood? Many of their furnishings come in kits you assemble yourself, using the dizzying variety of screws, bolts, and tiny misshapen Allen wrenches you find lurking in the box, like secretive metal bugs. I love wandering through the IKEA store. Normally I hate to shop. I will happily browse through a bookstore, but I avoid shops religiously otherwise. Unless I need something very specific and it would cost too much or take too long to order it off the Internet. But walking through IKEA is like following your own little Yellow Brick Road (or Red Linoleum Path, as the case may be) into an enchanted faerie-land of nonsense words and really convenient bookcases and wood...Did I mention wood? It's all so cute, and divorced from mundane reality...
Did I mention the first few pages of the catalogue are full of creepy floating kids' heads saying cute yet oddly Lynchian things like 'Welcome to the factory of good smells'?
This arachnid little FÖRBY stool has a name very close to Furby. And it is only five dollars. Can you believe it?
The PÄLLBO footstool is a cube. A big fucking turquoise cube. I love it.
The ROLIG and the multicoloured version of the KLAPPSTA are so wonderfully obnoxious...They triggered all of my magpie instincts. I wanted to grasp them in my talons and carry them back to my nest. Though they are the sort of furniture a decorator would kill you for keeping. There is no chance they would ever match anything else in your household, unless maybe you're David Hartwell, when they'd look positively tame compared to your jacket.
Of course, in this house, we swear by the BILLY bookcase.
For some reason, IKEA always makes me think of Autons. Happy, woody Autons. I'm sure it's a front for some kind of alien invasion. But then, what isn't?
Posted by aloysius at August 13, 2003 11:23 PM | TrackBack |