God bless Ingvar Kamprad. What a bally hero the founder of Ikea was. Not only because he gave us the Billy bookcase, but because he made it all right for posh people to buy their own furniture.
It’s easy to forget that when the first Ikea opened in Britain just over 30 years ago, times were tough for the aristocracy. They’d flogged the silver candlesticks to pay the school fees. They were sitting precariously on 18th-century Chippendale chairs that might buckle beneath them at any moment. They were sleeping on lumpy mattresses that their medieval ancestors had not only been born on, but probably died on too.
Then suddenly this Swedish import opened in Warrington and everything changed. It became acceptable to have — whisper it — new furniture. To own tables and wardrobes that you hadn’t inherited. True, in certain cases you had to make this furniture yourself. But that was quite jolly. A novelty. Almost like having an actual job for the day!
And this is why posh people love Ikea. Because, on the whole, it has immeasurably improved the comfort and ease of life at home and they can mix the old with the new. Nice springy Ektorp sofa from Ikea for £350 beside the bust of Great-Uncle Rupert. Or, as I saw in a castle in Wales once, manky old dog bed next to the Aga, lined with sheepskins bought from Ikea for £30 a pop.
The Camerons typified this blending approach when we saw their Downing Street kitchen. There was the customised marble table and the walnut flooring. But there was also an Ikea dresser. A posh friend says the trick is to buy Ikea lamp stands and disguise them with expensive silk shades.
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Lara Grylls, the sister of Bear and something of an interior designer herself, lives in a whopping ten-bedroom, seven-bathroom house just outside Leeds called Becca Hall. It has marble floors, three drawing rooms and a snooker room, but also floor-to-ceiling cupboards from Ikea and one long passage lined with family photos in black Ikea frames. “I went through a stage of being hooked on Ikea,” Lara Grylls says. “It used to be really fun to do as a morning out with children because it’s a bit like a museum.”
The great and the good in the north go to the Newcastle branch of Ikea, Grylls tells me. They’ll load up on £4.25 smoked salmon while there and use it as a starter at their next dinner party.
Posh students invariably have Ikea bedding (Tilkort duvet for £8!) and it’s a dead cert that Prince William and Kate’s flat in St Andrews would have featured a few Ikea knick-knacks. The seven-piece Snitsig cookware set for £25, perhaps. Or the Tackan toilet brush for 39p.
When I was a student I bought endless 85p vanilla candles from Ikea that made my flat smell like a massage parlour and, on one particular visit, I bought a small wooden storage box to keep my jewellery in. Two years later I moved abroad and left the box in the safekeeping of my flatmate, an Old Etonian and modern-day Marquis de Sade. When I returned home and wanted it back, I discovered it had been turned into storage for various of his leather and rubber implements. So I said he could keep it and I’d pop back to the Ikea on the North Circular to buy another, undefiled one. It only cost a fiver, so I could.
Really, it seems the only posho who doesn’t like Ikea is Jacob Rees-Mogg, who told a radio station at the weekend that he had “never been” and had “no ambitions to”. “Everything I have heard makes it sound enormously difficult and then when you get something you have to try and put it together,” said The Mogg. “That isn’t an area in which my skills lie.”
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Well, he’s missing out not only on decent furniture, but also a cracking game. One terrifically grand Scottish family I know buy flat-pack Ikea furniture for an after-lunch activity on Christmas Day. “We take the instructions away and put people into teams to see who can build what the fastest,” my friend Lizzie explains. What larks!
