The lost world of IKEA

IKEA room sets like the ghosts of more optimistic times; and some Couch to 100k writing tips

Apr 16, 2025

Whenever I walk into IKEA I feel like I’ve stepped into a Douglas Coupland novel. The mass production of a 1990s dream, little changed since its UK heyday as the style-setter in British homes, where the scarcity of outlets made it a much sought after commodity. We had one of the very few in Croydon, and for many it was their only knowledge of the borough. But its locality meant it was immediately the Gen X dream of my youth. I got two sets of pine wooden shelving ladders for my box room. I still have them now, it’s where I keep some of the other outmoded products that make life a bit more pleasant. A CD and mini-disc player. Doctor Who Weeklies from the late 1970s. Outsize town planning and architecture books from the mid-twentieth century.

Of course IKEA has a much longer history in Sweden than it does here. Founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad. it was one of the powerhouses of domestic Scandinavian modernism. And I appreciate how, as styles have come and gone, it’s kept to many of those original tenets. Apart from with those Stein transparent acrylic chairs.

Some of the products in Bletchley IKEA stretch back to earlier days. A Kippan sofa, first introduced in the 1980s. I had one of those, the workhorse of many a hopeless bachelor pad. Kallix shelving, the descendent of earlier model Expedit, those boxy voids barely existing beyond a vector diagram and some allen keys. Billy bookcases from 1979, the year of Heart of Glass and Thatcherism.

What are all these things doing here, now, in Bletchley IKEA, pretending everything is normal. Successive financial crises since the global one of 2008, including ideologically motivated austerity cuts, Brexit self harm, the Covid contraction of our lives, Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget and now Trump’s tariffs, have created a world very different one from IKEA’s nineties pomp. The effortless, sleek projection of progress via occasional tables and steel rails with hooks no longer feels plausible or realistic.

Instead these room sets, the sprawling market place, everything seems to be pretending that it’s business as usual. People will always need rainbow doormats.

It’s not hard to imagine any IKEA as the set for a zombie movie. The IKEA riots of 2012 showed the power of sharp elbows and the allure of a bargain (£35 sofas meant people were punched in the eye, trampled and wrestled to the floor), the behaviour pure Romero. At times like that it becomes a place dressed for post apocalyptic ruin.

It’s always been possible to sit on the sofas and desk chairs, open the kitchen cupboards and chests of drawers, like you live in one of these miniature lifestyle sets. It’s Larkin’s ‘Home is so Sad’, but unborn, that vase one of hundreds ready to be dispersed through the checkouts and into the city, the furnishings left not for the comfort of the last to leave, but for an imaginary client, positioned to look its best in the strip lighting from the angle of the walkway.

The real allure of IKEA is that’s it’s like life, but if it were perfect, with no life in it. No mess, no residents, no walls, just small partitions within the vast void of a shed. The perfect home for ghosts, who can drift around the space, who have no need to cook their own food or go to sleep on the oddly sized mattresses. Those ghosts, they’re dressed as skateboarders and slackers, stockbrokers and department store assistants, busy mums in cardigan coats and dads in full Gap, the people of the nineties crowded in, settling down to watch Changing Rooms on a Klippan, Friends playing in a TV on a Billy bookcase. In the corner, This Life.

Tips for non-fiction writers #7

Why doesn’t your writing feel like reading your favourite author? Well, all of our voices are different. That’s the joy of it. And it’s the thing you need to lean in to. Enjoying your voice is where the joy in writing comes from.

Think of paragraphs as a mini narrative. They should take you somewhere. You shouldn’t be in the same place at the end of a paragraph as you were at the beginning. Read back over one of yours and think about how it’s pushing the story forward.

Much of this will be down to the tone and dynamics of your writing. You can play with how hard or soft, lyrical or clipped your writing is, and that can be through the length of sentences or the sound of words as much as the subject. You can lead people along through a sustained mood, or shock them with a sudden change of pace – but be aware not to overdo it: being too one note, or too tricksy, both are exhausting.

Reading aloud is one of the most helpful things to do with any writing. Who knows, you might have to read an audiobook. When I read Iconicon out loud for the audio I was amazed to discover how unspeakable some of the sentences were. Unspeakably long, and indigestibly awkward. I won’t make that mistake again.

And remember, not every sentence or paragraph has to do everything. But a paragraph should ideally contain light and shade, changes of pace and tone, surprise and excitement, even if all of these things are on a glimmering micro-level rather than a showstopping bombastic one. It shouldn’t feel static.

EXERCISE: This is a ‘getting from A to B’ task. Write a short paragraph that begins with a line about your most recent journey from your home (be it a commute, to the shops or the doctors, whatever it is), and ends with a line about the topic of your book. We’re going to travel from a piece of insular and personal place writing to the heart of the subject you’re tackling. How do you get from one to the other? What do they mean in relation to one another? Can the journey metaphor help?