IKEA offers more than nine thousand products, divided into four “style groups”: Traditional, Scandinavian, Modern, and Popular. Like many rentals here, it comes furnished-which means that, instead of your having to go to IKEA and get the stuff yourself, the landlord goes to IKEA and gets it for you.

The apartment I live in now is a rental in west London. IKEA can also be Swedish for feeling like you’re never going to grow up. Amy Poehler once said that IKEA is Swedish for “argument.” In Tribeca, I pridefully refused IKEA, like a child announcing that she no longer plays with dolls. IKEA omits words from instruction booklets, because words make instruction booklets thicker, which makes them more expensive. There were several apartments in the West Village, and one, farther south, in which my parents and I spent a long night trying to assemble an IKEA bookshelf with the guidance of only a stick man with a mute smirk. It suffered from a plight that IKEA has acknowledged in an internal report titled “Life in Rental Accommodation”: the tragedy of the common room is that it often is a dump. A shared apartment in Manhattan followed. My first encounter with IKEA was in the freshman-year dormitory, where I marvelled at the profligacy of classmates who, that September, and each one thereafter, ordered a new couch from IKEA-and paid the ninety-nine-dollar delivery fee! (My roommates and I settled for a hand-me-down, which we covered with a sleeping bag and doused in Febreze.) By the time I was a senior, I had my own room and had acquired my first piece of IKEA furniture, an only slightly shopworn navy-blue love seat. Since graduating from college, nine years ago, I have moved eight times, propelled by the usual vicissitudes of money, romance, and work. The prevalence of IKEA in my apartment is more the result of circumstance than of desire or discernment. When IKEA stopped selling incandescent light bulbs, last year, six hundred and twenty-six million people became environmentalists. The invisible designer of domestic life, it not only reflects but also molds, in its ubiquity, our routines and our attitudes. IKEA calls itself the Life Improvement Store. In the fiscal year 2010, it sold $23.1 billion worth of goods, a 7.7-per-cent increase over the year before.

IKEA has three hundred and twenty-six stores in thirty-eight countries. KIVIK-along with a profusion of things I use every day-is made by IKEA, the Swedish home-furnishings company. Because it is a few years old, its lines are leaner than those of current models, which have been expanded to accommodate the modern habit of perching a laptop on the armrest. In the living room, I sat down on the KIVIK sofa. Rouged RÄTTVIK wineglasses and dirty DRAGON forks waited to be washed.

In the kitchen, some lettuce clung to the meniscus of a BLANDA BLANK salad bowl. I smoothed the DVALA fitted sheet and tucked the HENNY CIRKEL quilt beneath four pillows sheathed in matching polka-dot cases. I had slept on a SULTANA HAGAVIK mattress. On a recent Sunday, I woke up around 8 A.M. The company’s vision, one executive said, is “to create a better life for the many.” Illustration by Laurie Rosenwald

Smalland ikea