If you visit Almhult in southern Sweden there is only one place to stay — the Ikea Hotel. In the drawer of the sparse hotel room, furnished with an Ikea bed, Ikea curtains and Ikea Grusblad duvet, you find two publications — the Gideons New Testament and the Ikea catalogue.
This is the first sign that Almhult is no ordinary town, but the centre of a cult, northern Europe’s very own Pyongyang, where the Allen key has replaced the nuclear bomb and Ingvar Kamprad, Ikea’s founder, is the locals’ Kim Il-sung. It is the place of Kamprad’s birth and where he returned — from tax exile in Switzerland — to spend his final days.
When I visited a couple of years ago he was treated with the reverence of a religious leader. After his death on Saturday I expect the town will become a shrine to a man who, despite his many flaws and deep eccentricities, changed not just the way we buy furniture, but also how we live our lives.
Like most parents, Sunday afternoons battling with wooden dowels and strange, illogical ziggurats of metal have punctuated my fatherhood years. Cots, shelves and storage units have all been built with equal amounts of monumental swearing and blisters. “Leave Daddy alone, he’s trying to put up your bed,” for a while became as regular a refrain as: “Shall we watch some Peppa Pig?”
My father’s generation tinkered about in the garden shed or under the bonnet of an Austin Allegro. We had Ikea flat-pack.
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The very worst row I’ve had with my wife (then girlfriend) was in Ikea Brent Cross. What we were buying is lost in the mists of time. Possibly a Billy bookcase, maybe a Malm chest of drawers. The labyrinth of showrooms that would put Daedalus to shame had exerted its strange, energy-sapping power. Then we couldn’t find the item in the warehouse. The interminable queue at the till turned simmering resentment into public quarrelling. By the time we got to the car park and I’d crushed my feet dropping the boxed-up Billy or Malm she was sobbing hysterically that I was never going to marry her and I was screaming that the Billy bookcase wasn’t a metaphor it was just a piece of junk.
We vowed never to return to Ikea. But we did. Like moths to the flame we would go back for tea towels, lamps, jars, tumblers, those incredibly useful plastic clips that get lost in a kitchen drawer. I have measured out my life in Ikea Sedlig coffee spoons — £4 a set. All four of our children have slept in Ikea cots and been weaned from Ikea plastic plates. The night we came back from hospital with number three I had to make a late-night dash to Ikea Edmonton to buy a missing screw for the cot that had been put away in the attic too hastily. It was a low moment. But at least Ikea stays open until 10pm.
How could one shop, with a mere 20 outlets in the UK, have exerted such a hold over millions of Britons? In the first 25 years since it opened its first UK store in Warrington, Cheshire, in 1987 it is estimated that British customers bought 12.8 million mattresses from Ikea, nearly one for every two households. One in five children in Britain was conceived in an Ikea bed, it has been claimed. When it opened in Edmonton in 2005, riots ensued, with five people taken to hospital. Even John Lewis or Marks & Spencer, the traditional retail touchstones of Middle England, don’t exert this hold on its customers.
The answer to this question lies in Almhult, which is not just Kamprad’s birthplace, but also home to the first Ikea. Here you will find the Ikea test lab, Europe’s largest photographic studio, where all of the catalogues are photographed. There is also an Ikea bank as well as Ikea of Sweden — a separate unit that designs all of the bunk beds, picture frames and bookcases that have made the company such a money-making machine — and Ikea Aktivitetshuset, where co-workers can come to unwind at an Ikea spa or at the Ikea bar. There is an Ikea Museum, which mythologises Kamprad’s childhood, but fails to mention his teenage membership during the war of the New Swedish Movement, which supported Nazi Germany. (Kamprad later said this was the “greatest mistake of my life”.)
Then there is the Ikea Corporate Cultural Centre. A place where workers around the world come on a pilgrimage to be inspired, this is where the full oddity of the Ikea sect hits you. Journalists are usually not allowed inside this particular building and I had to deposit any recording equipment before I entered. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is piped out of the speakers and pictures of Kamprad float on the walls, each with one of his little slogans — “humbleness and willpower”, “striving to meet reality”, “constant desire for renewal”. There is a 4ft-high pyramid that emits strange sounds and is meant to sum up the Ikea belief in “togetherness”. If you rub all the sides simultaneously it makes harmonious music. If you prod it in a lacklustre way the pyramid groans in pain.
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The Corporate Cultural Centre lays bare the secret to Kamprad’s success — relentless cost-cutting. Tales of Kamprad’s frugality make Ebenezer Scrooge sound positively profligate. Despite being one of the world’s ten richest men, worth more than £40 billion when he died, he claimed to buy his clothes from a flea market and get his hair cut by his wife or when he visited developing countries to save money. He travelled economy, drove a 20-year-old Volvo and for many years based one of Ikea’s controlling firms in Luxembourg to save on taxes.
That tight-fistedness was embedded into the company from the early years. His genius was to back two developments that would save him money. One was the car — he realised that the rise of Volvo and Saab would mean that families could drive to large out-of-town shops. Here, rents were considerably cheaper than on the high street and the customer did the job of transporting the goods home. The other key development was the flat-pack.
The flat-pack was famously conceived after Kamprad watched an employee remove the legs from a table to fit it into a car. But the cost savings of flat-packs are not just in getting the customer to assemble the product, but also in the distribution of the product.
Ikea reckons that up to 70 per cent of the cost of anything it makes is transport and trucking air inside the lorry was, in Kamprad’s eyes, a criminal waste. In his manifesto entitled The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, Kamprad says that cost consciousness has to “permeate everything we do, almost to the point of that kind of exaggerated meanness that some may call penny-pinching”.
This is why so many of its non-flat-pack items, such as chairs, glasses and flowerpots, are stackable. Ikea sells a hugely popular plastic watering can called the Ikea PS 2002, with a long spout and a V-shaped handle, for a mere 85p. I was told that the reason it is so cheap is that you can stack 150 of them on top of each other in the back of a lorry — wasting no space.
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The cheapness of so many of the products was like a breath of fresh air when it arrived in Britain, introducing us to blond wood and Scandi-straight lines. Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme had meant there were a million more homeowners than in the previous decade and students were going off to university in far greater numbers than before. Most of this demographic didn’t have the money or inclination to save up for a DFS three-piece suite.
“Chuck out the chintz” was one of Ikea’s early slogans. It summed up the company’s philosophy — young couples and adults no longer needed to rely on handed-down heavy, dark furniture or second-hand crockery. They could pretend that they lived in a European loft conversion even if they lived in a bedsit in Ashton-under-Lyne. Many of the company’s bestselling products are what it calls “breathtaking items” — so cheap you can’t afford not to buy them — airtight jars for 75p, shower curtains for £1.50, a bedroom mirror for £1.50. These mugs, glasses, loo brushes and storage boxes are just as much a key to Ikea’s aesthetic as the furniture, their simple functionality adding a dash of modernity into our Victorian semis.
Anders Danielsson was one of the Ikea executives who opened the Warrington store in 1987 and remembers how Britain fell for Scandinavian designs. “We were on a wave and we were on a mission together with the consumer. They had already decided to change to modernity. We facilitated it — that change from Old England to Cool Britannia,” he told me.
It’s a bold claim. But not without foundation. It’s true that Terence Conran had introduced Britain to flat-packs and cheap, stylish homewares two decades before with Habitat. However, the Habitat stores, while cutting edge in many ways, were unrepentantly middle class, places where the staff wore Mary Quant-designed uniforms and espressos were served in the coffee shop.
Ikea was obsessed with being “democratic”. Truly anyone could afford its photo frames, candle holders or side tables and keep on returning for some more, be they in Shanghai, Schaumburg or Sheffield. Ikea — before the fast fashion of Primark took off — introduced Britain and the world to fast furnishings. If your Billy bookcase led to an actual divorce, no problem! You could ditch your bedroom bookcase as easily as you could ditch your spouse. Just get another. Ikea’s success in the 1990s matched Britain’s rising divorce rates. Now divorce rates have stabilised and few can afford to get on the housing ladder, but Ikea continues to make shedloads of money by appealing to generation rent. Last year its UK turnover was £1.8 billion, up from £1.2 billion in 2014.
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My marriage has survived Ikea. In fact, my children actively ask to visit the store; they see it as a fun day out, the Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam in the café a highlight. I was there just before Christmas, buying some napkins, a box of Kafferep — those moreish gingerbread thin biscuits — and some emergency festive batteries. No one else, not Duracell, nor Panasonic, makes such good-value AAs. Douglas Alexander, the former transport secretary and MP, was in the food section and on the phone to his mother, forlornly asking her how many packs of dark chocolate she needed. It really is a store for anyone.
The trick is not to buy furniture unless you have to. And if you have to, pay your teenage son to put it up for you. It’ll still work out cheaper than almost anywhere else.
Kamprad, with his thrift-store jumpers and questionable past, is sometimes mocked for his overweening ambition. He wanted his furniture shop “to create a better everyday life for the many people”. But it was an ambition he achieved. Not many can say that.
