I, Kea
I make my first trip to the big box since becoming a homeowner.
I used to go to Ikea regularly in New York. The one in Redhook. I would hike the shoppable miles with the woman who would become my wife, picking up clothes hangers, cups, bedding and other nick-knacks to adorn our rented apartment. To make it feel like home.
Now, we have a home and the stakes are different. We’re going to put in a new kitchen that will affect the look and feel of our domestic lives for some time. It will probably increase the value of our house.
Can’t fuck it up.
Ikea wasn’t our first or easiest choice. Howden’s, Wrens and at least a dozen other companies that specialize in kitchens have showrooms within a few minutes drive of my house.
Remarkably, due to combinations and permutations of range, materials, prices and presentation, each and every one of the more convenient options alienated us. The only answer was to park the kids with indulgent grandparents and drive 2.5 hours south to Milton Keynes, city of a future. A future that never materialized. A future where everyone propels their bodies through space on segways, or jetsons’ style personal spacecraft, anything with a motor.
I’d seen it on YouTube videos from its conceptual beginnings. I was pleasantly surprised by the tree growth, and/but it reminds me of the interconnected strip malls of Houston or some other dystopian US cartown.
But it also felt ancient. A testament to a past civilization with whom I have little in common. Like the pyramids, or the parthenon poking out of 21st century Athens.
Somewhere on the edge of it lives Ikea. Peak capitalism in a (big) box.
We parked up and ascended the escalator to immerse ourselves in a multiverse of possible domestic lives and kitchens. Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More was the immersive theatre hit in New York when I first turned up. I realise now that its appeal was ‘Ikea with the lights off’.
Ikea is devilishly clever. Thoroughly engrossing. After an hour or so I was ready to throw in the towel, I’d considered all the worktop and cabinet combinations I could hold in my head. I’d measured more sinks than I could have ever imagined.
Just at that moment I came to the cafe. Refreshed by a cup of coffee and a Swedish chocolate wafer biscuit, and buoyed by food prices I hadn’t seen for 20 years (£1.75 for a coffee? A meatball main for £3??), I was jazzed up enough to extend the scope of my ambitions to include a built in wardrobe AND lighting.
We actually left the store only about £40 lighter. With some coathangers and cups for old times’ sake and a jar of herring to eat with our fingers on the 2.5 hour drive home in lieu of proper lunch.
But they will be receiving a solid 4 figures worth of business in the near future. I don’t know how they do what they do, but it’s effective.
I guess that’s called higgie or something?
To tell me how to spell that darned word.
I’m composing this post in-app.
Oh. here’s that dystopian vid I saw about Milton Keynes.