Why our furniture should last longer than our politicians
How often, would you say, do chairs break? I’m going to open the bidding with “not very often”. Not never. God, no. I’m not saying that! I won’t be cornered into such an absurd pronouncement. That would be “Liz Truss will never be prime minister” all over again! But my general expectation, when in a room, is that most of the chairs are going to remain functional until I leave it. The same thing used to be said of prime ministers.
More often than seeing a chair break, you come across one that’s basically already broken, betraying saucy glimpses of dowel, for the imps of fate to guide the ample posterior of a sensitive soul towards on some relatively public occasion, preferably while the soul is holding a large slice of gateau.
Right, tables. How often do they break? You can already tell this is going to be a scintillating read. Well, that is basically never. Dining room tables, I mean. Kitchen tables, boardroom tables. Big wooden ones, they’re eternal. Occasional tables aren’t eternal though. They’re mortal as well as occasional and tend to nest for strength. I wouldn’t say they’re exactly dropping like flies, though.
Wardrobes next. Well, the doors and any drawers are a weakness but it’s all mendable – and more easily mendable than the dowel-flaunting chair that has successfully seduced the rearward attentions of a now-tearful large-arsed patisserie fan and had its joints turned to sawdust. The fundamental structure of a wardrobe is hard to destroy. In my mind’s eye I can see them in photos of the blitz, flapping open on the upper floors of de-fronted houses. Nothing wrong with them that a couple of screws and some Pledge won’t fix. Take that, Hitler!
So how come there’s so much new furniture constantly on sale? Why is it such a prominent retail item? Anecdotally, at least, old furniture doesn’t appear to be expiring quickly enough to make way for all this stuff. The current modest rate of population growth isn’t sufficient to explain it either. I reckon people are throwing out perfectly good furniture.
When a chair does break, it feels to me that it is quite likely to be an Ikea chair that’s been purchased comparatively recently. Now that is just, I hasten to add for evident legal reasons, my personal feeling and unrepresentative experience, but if there is any truth to it, it may be because Ikea chairs have often been put together by amateurs. That is no reflection on Ikea’s manufacturing process, the professionalism of which I wouldn’t dare to question in a paragraph already fraught with risk. I’m referring to the fact that Ikea products are often assembled by the company’s customers who, statistically speaking, are overwhelmingly unlikely to be professional cabinet-makers.
That’s the deal with flat-pack furniture – you put it together yourself and then it breaks because you don’t really know how to make furniture, which, ironically, was a key reason you forced yourself to endure the living hell of a visit to an out-of-town furniture store. It’s like the opposite of those expensive cooking kits that give precise instructions and ingredients to allow someone the illusion that they’ve cooked their own dinner. Ikea provides us with the inexpensive illusion that we haven’t had to build our own furniture.
Not so inexpensive any more, though. It was reported last week that Ikea’s prices are soaring by up to 80% because, the retailer says, of “macroeconomic developments… from the increased cost of materials and transportation to the war in Ukraine and inflation”. These dramatically expanding prices at a time of dramatically contracting disposable income must surely imperil the chain’s business model as well as spelling the end of thousands of dream lounges.
By “dream lounge” I do not mean a new sort of therapy where the stressed and affluent are invited into white and calming rooms in order to snooze themselves less moany amid therapists who resolutely keep a straight face – though I suspect those sort of dream lounges might have been hit by macroeconomic developments as well and are having to cut back on how often they give the bowls of translucent pebbles a rinse. No, I’m talking about the home makeover, popularised by dozens of interior design-based TV formats, the attempt to transform our living spaces into something brighter, calmer, cleaner or in some way differently bland.
For people in need of furniture, the Ikea price increase is a bad thing. But for all those who just fancy a change, who are in the mood for chucking out perfectly good stuff and replacing it with a load of flat-pack crap (or “flatcrap” – like a cow pat, but marginally easier to assemble into a bookcase), I don’t think it is a bad thing. The idea that the inside of people’s houses should respond to fashion on a similar timescale to the clothes they wear is unsustainable, both financially and environmentally.
Chairs should be quite expensive but built to last so that you never have to replace them. You should have the same hopes of longevity from your home’s furniture as you do from its wiring. If it’s been done properly, you shouldn’t have to touch it for ages, if ever. If this spells the end of the home makeover and a resumption of the idea that you don’t replace something unless it’s unmendably broken, then that’s entirely good news.
It would, however, close off another avenue of “economic growth”. I’m revealing myself as a fully-paid-up member of the anti-growth coalition, except there is no membership to pay because that would be economic activity which we in the coalition hate. Replacing chairs that don’t need replacing with ones that look a bit different but don’t last, and if they do accidentally last are rendered eye-wateringly unfashionable within the decade in order to keep the whole vacuous loop of disposal and repurchase going, doesn’t achieve anything good. It sends us skint and it screws up the planet. But it does push up GDP, which has become politicians’ go-to measure of whether our collective existence is worthwhile.
If this spells the end of the home makeover, then that’s entirely good news