"Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
I've been pretty stunned during my travels to find that it's really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk. No other culture seems nearly as interested, and some actively discourage it in favor of more real, personal topics. It's one of those things where once you start noticing it, it just gets cringier and cringier.
Not everyone lives in sitcoms or spends all their free time watching TV...
The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over. And even then we're usually doing other things than just lazing about.
> I've been pretty stunned during my travels to find that it's really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk.
It's a slight exaggeration, but yeah. I've really started noticing it on HN and some news-ish sites too, over the past couple of years: where a book would normally be used as a reference point, now a film is more commonly used instead.
Adult Americans read so few books per year, on average, that it’s barely an exaggeration to assert that we don’t read books at all. And most of what we do read is romance novels or juvenile fiction. Been like that for a while.
> The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over.
You make it sound like this is not merely a rare thing for you, but that it should be rare... I don't just passively sit and watch much television and yet I have spent an incredible amount of time in my life sitting on either my couch or the couch of a friend -- or even one of many couches at an office -- talking and laughing and having fun with other human beings. If I had to choose only one: a couch or a dining table, I'd go with a couch. Now... bed? That's harder for me, but I can totally see people deciding couch (as you can sleep on the couch but it is awkward as hell to invite people over and only have a bed to use).
And while 2-4 people are playing pool, where's everybody else? On various sitting furniture. I think we need to go one step further, and revive the conversation pit. (aka, the supercouch)
> "Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
I think you may be engaging in a bit of axe grinding here! I agree that the sofa is one of the post important pieces of furniture in my home [1], but for reasons that have nothing to do with television. There is no TV in the room! But it is still where I spend the most time sitting during downtime, reading books, talking to my family, etc. And when I have friends over, we're either there or at the dining room table.
[1] For the title of the most important, I might have picked my bed. But that's a quibble.
> "Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
That's quite a leap. Did you consider that dwell.com might not have actually done a study on what Americans consider the "most important piece of furniture" but just used that phrase to justify the very existence of their article?
I'm not making any claims about the preferences of Americans but about the default assumptions of the authors. It is as good a reflection of cultural attitudes as any.
> really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk
For one, it doesnt seem like americans are significant outliers in tv consumption[1] or smartphone usage[2]. For another, yeah if you're a foreign traveller people probably aren't going to make small talk with you about TV or other pop culture...
I'm not speaking to consumption, I'm speaking to small talk. There's no good reason to believe there's a tight correlation there.
Americans constantly shove TV into the conversation even if they don't know that the other person or people are familiar with it. Though many are aware of American media output by virtue of the cultural colonialism enacted since brute force fell out of fashion. Even if they're not explicitly speaking about TV they're still doing the IRL version of posting reaction GIFs by quoting memes in response to earnest conversation.
Not to interrupt your principled tirade against lazy Americans or whatever, but it's not a "claim", let alone an ideological one. It's just a bog standard literary device for framing a puff piece.
> "Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
My family doesn't watch TV. I purchased my sofa when I didn't even have a TV.
The most important aspect of my living room arrangement is how well it facilitates long, deep, conversations with friends who come over for visits.
I have 3 pieces of seating in my living room, a chair for reading placed next to a book case (large enough that a couple small kids can sit in the lap of an adult who is reading with them if so desired), a smaller 2 person sofa, and a larger 6ft long sofa.
I know plenty of other families who have similar arrangements with sofas so placed as to emphasize socialization with friends.
Now if we are talking about the 90s and early 2000s, yeah, it was all about amazing TV watching experiences.
> The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over. And even then we're usually doing other things than just lazing about.
The couch is where you retire to after dinner has been finished and everything cleaned away. Board games may occur in other rooms (depending on one's coffee table situation) the of course a room that is laid out for conversation is going to see the most use when there are people over to have a conversation with.
FWIW now that I have a kid, I am hosting social events more often than ever before (watching children has a negative co-efficient for small values of n > 1, 3 kids are easier to watch than 1!), but even in my DINK life (at which point I didn't even own a TV), my couch got plenty of use.
Are you sure it's "Americans" or is it the Internet? Our experience of Americans may not be identical. Even just my co-workers and family seem to rarely if ever be aware of the same things on television I care about, granting I watch far more nature documentaries than anything else and had no access to broadcast networks until they launched streaming services in the last couple years since I cord cut around 2011 or so. The only thing from the past 15 years I can think of that seemed widely at least known about to most people I talked to was Game of Thrones, but even that was far from universal. My HVAC guy commented that I looked different because I had long hair and a ponytail the last time he saw me a few years ago and I said it was because I grew my hair out for Khal Drogo cosplay and he had no clue what I was talking about. He'd never even seen Game of Thrones or probably any other television. I actually remember that about two of my ex-girlfriend's dads from when I was in my early 20s. They were both small business owners and had no knowledge whatsoever about pop culture. They were so focused on their businesses that they never watched any television or saw any films.
In any case, even though there is nothing on television I watch with any regularity currently, I would still rate my sofa as a fairly important piece of furniture. Not as important as my bed, but it is the largest piece of furniture and the centerpiece of my largest room. My kitchen/living room is open floor plan townhouse and I cook quite a bit, and I can't just stand all day, so that's where I rest, even though I'm just listening to music when I do so and not watching television. When I lay down to read a book, that's also usually where I do it. If I take a nap during the day, it's typically on the sofa. We usually eat dinner there, too, even though we're not watching television, just because it's more comfortable than any other place we have to sit. I even work from my sofa pretty frequently.
But I've got no complaints, personally. I paid $300 or so at the PX when I joined the Army almost 20 years ago and bought my first house and still have the same sofa. It certainly didn't fall apart on me. It's moved with me four times. My wife and I debate getting a nice one but always decide not to because our cats are going to tear it up and puke on it all the time anyway.
Does media consumption include "conversing with guests?" The sofa is the place everybody goes to chat unless we're having a meal.
Frankly, we'd probably use it a little less if our dining chairs were more comfortable, and I do think there's a very good case to be made that dining room chairs are more important than the sofa, but nonetheless, I really don't think a sofa is especially tied to TV culture in any way.
If we're going to be doing something rather than lazing around or eating, we're not going to be in the house at all.
This is why I trust IKEA’s price to quality ratio. I know I won’t be getting the highest quality, but I will likely be getting the highest quality to price ratio.
Got this one in 2016 for $1,100, and it’s survived 2 kids with minimal pilling. It won’t impress anyone, but I have no problem using it.
Yeah, the correct choices for furniture these days are basically: used (cheap if you’re not buying something trendy like mid century modern), IKEA, or super-expensive really-good stuff. Anything new that’s cheaper than that last category’s usually just gonna be as bad or worse than IKEA, plus 1.2x-5x the price. And likely uglier.
I think even showy luxury brands like RH do better than West Elm. CB2 as well, which is a slight step up from Crate and Barrel.
West Elm and the whole Pottery Barn set of brands are just worse versions of Crate and Barrel, with terrible customer service to go with it. They had some of the most mean and rude customer service agents I’ve ever talked to. They acted like the store was an entirely different company, then the store acted like I needed to call the national call line. Plus, they outsource deliveries in a very annoying blame-shifting way.
At least at RH you get a single human point of contact who can handle everything like a concierge experience.
Not really ironic. It's available in 10 different fabric options. If you're surprised that a wool/alpaca blend fabric isn't heard wearing, or that boucle snags easily then you didn't think through the purchase. I have a similar sofa with the Beck fabric and it's great for the way I use it. The flambier boucle fabric looks great, but as a cat owner, I'd never purchase it.
I do agree with this. When you build them yourself and see the underneath of them they really aren’t that awful compared to a store couch that is possibly using even worse construction techniques.
The only problem I have with them is that they have almost no couch designs that have a more plush style. Almost all of them are firmer foams and just plain not appealing designs.
$2700 is what I got mine for. I think price might have been lowered to $2300 now.
It's built in Poland. Solid wood with steel reinforcement in the form of steel tubing in places, springs, and then a pillow system on top of that. The firm making it is the Swedish company SITS.
But I think one has to actually sit in a bunch of couches to see whether they're good.
Jumping in with the pro-IKEA crowd. I've had a KIVIK since 2017 that has survived me, my wife, and friends incredibly well. It's moved with us 3 times and still is in great shape. Easily the best value piece of furniture currently in my home.
I ripped the dust cover off and added 3 new frame stretchers made from 2x8 construction lumber (and tied other loose joints back together) and its done pretty well since then:
https://imgur.com/a/bqlLgW3 (wish I'd gotten a few more pictures, but I was tired by this point). Just shocking how terrible the construction is.
As if it wasn't bad enough that most consumer goods have completely bifurcated into "junk" and "luxury", now it's hard to even tell which products fall into which category, because there is so much junk now being sold as luxury.
Yeah. Even at the time we knew West Elm wasn't high end, but we were at least expecting decent.
We know more now (and could afford better) whenever we have to finally replace this, but $2000 is a not-insignificant investment that shouldn't be a complete piece of crap.
My problem is that I don’t even know where to buy _good_ stuff. I don’t want to pay $5k for a couch, but maybe I will _once_ in N years, for some large N, if I know it’s very well made and I like the design.
But I have no idea where to go for this. The overlap between junk and luxury is too large nowadays.
As with so many goods these days, I find that buying stuff made at least a couple of decades ago works best. It's much easier to tell the garbage from the treasure if you aren't buying stuff made recently.
It's often not, because today's company is not the same as it was 10-20 years ago. The longer you want something to last, the less reliable past experience becomes.
Aggregated reddit searches are amazing. Leads you to the gold mine that is american leather etc, which are often rebranded to more well known brands on a model by model basis. Lots of insiders on reddit with that info too.
Maybey cynicism broke me but I find it impossible to trust recommendations from Reddit. It's too easy for these companies to pay for astroturfing these days.
I've noticed a very prevalent "hail corporate" subculture on reddit that put me off believing anything anyone said.
I’ve had a consistently good experience with room and board so far and I am very anal about construction quality (as perceived by myself, anyway, I’m not a furniture expert).
West Elm's quality has definitely dropped the last 10 years. It's still not a bad place to get things like side tables, but I definitely wouldn't buy any furniture there any more, which is too bad. We had gotten a couple of nice pieces there in the past, although they're now gone.
For quality modern furniture, the only game in town around me is Room & Board. The last couch we bought there was ~$6k[0]. It's a lot, but we'd honestly been eyeing it for almost 20 years and it'll likely be something we have for another 20 years or more.
I’ve had multiple fancy chairs, purchased from a famous high end brand with a very high end showroom in a very high end design center, fail very quickly. The failure was due to their vendor (fancy, in France) using nice solid finger jointed hardwood, well finished, in a place where that construction was completely inappropriate.
High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades.
Nice materials + pretty design does not necessarily result in a good product.
I don't think that amluto is saying that the hardwood itself is inappropriate, or is necessarily ever inappropriate. I think they are saying that the specific joinery in their example was form over function, to the point where the joint was a critical point of failure.
Having done a bit of woodworking as a hobby, I would say that hardwood could be inappropriate if it is used for an element that is purely structural, internal (and thus will be hidden by external features) and there are cheaper alternatives that are just as good, or stronger materials available and we are talking about a critical structural element.
That's a pretty abstract answer but it's always going to depend on the specific project. Sometimes a piece of furniture has no hidden internal structure, or the appeal of the furniture is that it is all bare wood and you want it made entirely out of a beautiful "furniture grade" hardwood. For certain upholstered furniture, such as many sofas, using expensive materials for inner framing could not only be superfluous and add unnecessary cost to the piece, but in certain circumstances there may be better materials available even if you could make a perfectly adequate structural support that will last a lifetime using expensive hardwood and the right joinery for critical stress points.
I read amulto's point as being "expensive material and fancy joinery doesn't matter if you have a weak design."
The chairs had four legs, each of which radiated out horizontally from a central point (they were swivel chairs) then turned downward to the floor. The legs were about 1/2” wide, maybe a bit more. They were maybe 1” tall (vertically in the horizontal section and horizontally in the vertical section).
So the grain needed to run horizontally in the horizontal part to support the bending load. It was probably best for the grain to be vertical in the vertical part, although that was maybe less critical: that section was mostly in compression. It probably also looked better that way.
In any case, the actual construction put a finger joint in the horizontal section just past the turn, so a tiny bit of vertical grain wood extended horizontally over the turn. And several of the legs cracked just along the side of the finger joint, and one failed completely after about a month of gentle use.
The design plausibly could have worked if the joint went diagonally through the turn or was below it. But plywood is strong along both in-plane axes, and the legs could likely have been cut in single pieces from sheets of plywood with strength to spare.
Attractive plywood, even from hardwood species, is readily available. The plies are visible along the cut edge, but this is actually a style people like, especially in Scandinavian furniture. Even IKEA sells some nice chairs with plywood elements, at entirely reasonably price points.
I think he meant "place" as in literally "the location on the furniture" rather than the (very reasonable from context) interpretation I suspect we both had that it mean "place" in the geographic, or at least climatic sense. Which is itself important as certain woods deal with extremes of humidity better than others. In a temperate climate, just about any old wood will do, but somewhere that is very dry OR very wet, woods like mahogany and teak are best.
Teak especially is so good at dealing with water that it was harvested to near extinction in the 19th century just to build ship's decks and cabins out of it.
Reminds me previous sets of dinner chairs my parents had. Glued together. Slowly dried and then they were less than ideal... Even if the materials are good it means nothing if techniques are wrong.
The glue will probably be the strongest part of it, but finger-jointed hardwood isn't that terrible. Any decent wood glue is crazy strong.
The problem with knots is that they resist drilling and screwing. The problem with new growth is that the pith is the weakest part of the wood, and new growth has the most pith.
Still, it's not a weak and terrible pos wood-like material like 1990's MDF, it will probably be ok for most uses as long as the grain direction is respected in regards to shear direction (typically you want the grain direction to run perpendicular to the shear forces) and everything is properly braced.
The piece in question involved one of the starting wood sections being finger jointed with the grain running along the joint line. It failed where the bases of the fingers were tangent to the grain, which seemed pretty predictable to me just looking at the wood.
This wasn’t (as far as I can tell) cheap finger jointed knotty wood. It was some furniture maker who thought “well, this part needs the grain one way and this other part needs the grain the other way, and I have a finger jointing machine, so I’ll finger joint it!” Even if they somehow found a shop that stocked sheets of finger jointed wood with a 90 degree grain rotation across the joint, it would have been an incredibly inefficient way to produce the part in question.
But they didn’t think very hard — see my other comment. I don’t think a single solid piece of hardwood would have performed a whole lot better. Either metal reinforcement or plywood or much more carefully considered joinery was needed.
That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn their leftover product to protect some secret of Dr Who purses that are bigger or magically organized on the inside, but because the entire value of the brand is "I can afford this and you cannot"
Luxury has ALWAYS been about signalling and displaying status and power. It's always about rubbing the prole's faces in their supposed supremacy. Remember, they have money because they are better than you, definitely not because there are systems and structures in place that make it easier to get rich for the already wealthy and connected.
Unfortunately it seems so many people really struggle to understand that while quality often costs a lot, costing a lot does not imply quality in any way. If you can afford to spend oodles on marketing for your product, you probably aren't spending as much on quality as people assume you would.
This is why I differentiate between "quality" and "luxury". Luxury goods are very often just expensive junk that people buy in order to signal that they have money.
Quality goods are well-designed, well-made, etc. And you can't be sure about quality based on price.
>It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan.
Not sure why Coach was chosen for this example - I don't believe they are expensive; last I checked they were in the range of $200-500, which doesn't seem egregious as the actual luxury brands (ex. Hermes, where the entry level bags are $4,000).
That said, I feel there is a real difference in quality at various price points, and focusing on the material ("magic leather") is wrong. When I'm paying a premium I'm usually looking for in the dimensions of construction, and usually that means paying an actual professional who may charge $100/hr, vs 19 year old in Bangladesh. The two might be using the same material but the price difference comes from the person assembling the item.
The problem is you have a ton of companies (even "luxury" ones), that in an attempt to juice their stock price, have also focused on getting costs super low and are now using the same factories as junk brands but just slapping their logo on it. Even products of the same brand can vary wildly in quality depending even on the year it was made.
I have jackets from "luxury" brands that I bought 10 years ago that still look brand new for thousands of dollars (and probably saved money in the long run), but buying a similar item new or even trying to replace it is impossible.
Some brands like Hermes, Rolex, etc. also require you to establish a “relationship” with them to acquire their most popular items (Birkin or Kelly bags, stainless steel watches). This entails a lengthy purchase history, and some schmoozing of your assigned sales associate doesn’t hurt either. Unless you’re some well known figure, just waltzing into a boutique with a suitcase full of cash won’t get you what you want to buy on your first visit.
Other brands are catching on. I hear Porsche (or at least some dealerships) have started gatekeeping 911s this way.
Even their models that share platforms with “lesser” brands in the corporate stable go through a lot to differentiate them.
But if you don’t care about cars or enjoy driving, then all of it is a moot point and probably meaningless to you, and you might as well enjoy a Toyota Camry and call it a day.
…on the straight away of lap one. The top trim model 3 performance best time around the green hell is like 9 minutes. There are factory Porsches that will do it in under 7.
This is a very ironic comment to have made in a thread about how cheap things aren’t as good as they seem once you look a bit deeper.
Depends on where you drive, dude. I spend more time on mountain roads than highways.
And, also, if you like driving, and sometimes drive for fun, curves are way more fun than freeways. None of this has anything to do with supercars, either. My boring mom-car has more than enough power to merge safely. It's (surprisingly, to most people) faster (acceleration and top-speed) and (impressively - ICE tech advanced so much) more fuel-efficient than my almost thirty year old Miata. But, obviously, I enjoy the latter 1000x more than the former.
I guess this makes me a car geek. <shrug> That's fine. I do enjoy driving my super-basic, entry-level sportscar. I have less than zero interest in supercars.
Mercedes and other manufacturers do this as well. While it's arguably an extreme example, you can't purchase the Mercedes Benz Project One hypercar unless you have a history of purchasing their low-volume, extremely expensive cars (AMG Black Series, etc).
> degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan.
Where are there local artisans selling leather purses they made for $200? Are you sure you don't mean $4,000? Surely if you are buying a $200 hand made purse, it was made by hand in a low labor cost country and relabeled.
https://saddlebackleather.com/everyday-purse/ is a bit over $200, and doesn't hide that it's made in Mexico (though they do use machines and tooling to process the leather so perhaps it's not "hand made").
I don't have a purse. (Well, I have something from Mountainsmith I've had for decades that a friend calls a man purse. I'm sure it's been in dozens of countries.) But I have a front-pocket wallet/business card holder from Saddlebackleather that wasn't particularly expensive and will probably last as long as I need it to unless I lose it.
I’ve got one of their backpacks. It’s very nice. Heavy, though, at around five pounds. Sadly it almost never gets any use, because I rarely have need for a backpack. I should have bought some luggage instead.
Like the other poster, I also have a couple of their wallets. They’re simple but obviously high quality. They don’t feel as slick as the Coach wallet I was given as a gift, but I have no doubt they will hold up longer.
Leather is actually not a great material for a backpack or an outdoor (non-dressy) shoulder bag from a practical perspective in the 21st century. Nylon and related synthetics is a lot more practical. If you gave me a leather outdoor bag I'd probably thank you nicely and stick it in a closet or sell it.
I do like leather wallets though I almost exclusively use small front pocket ones these days because of sciatica and minimal needs for carrying either cash or a lot of cards.
The front pocket bifold I carry has room for several hundred dollars in cash, and at least 8 credit card sized objects (and could easily hold 2 or 3x that if you didn't mind stacking the less frequently used ones, not counting my ID. How much are these people carrying?
People also probably used to be more fashion-conscious with having even relatively bulky bifold wallets in their front pockets. I carry basically a business card holder with significantly less on a day-to-day basis. Maybe $40 and likely about half a dozen credit card sized object things.
I carry a travel folder when I travel but my actual wallet is pretty minimalist. (Though just a phone wallet/pocket doesn't work for me. The Apple magnetic wallet I bought which I was also uncomfortable with depending on was 3 cards--no more, no less.
I can second SaddlebackLeather. Have a few items from them and the care taken with the design, in addition to the materials used, tells me these items will last a long time.
Some years ago I found a leatherworker, who sells simple handbags/clutches starting at about 300 EUR. He also sells wallets and belts. He has a limited selection of styles, but they are made-to-order thus you can select the colors when you place your order.
He isn't local to me, but I've met him and watched him stitch his bags together and chatted about his style (minimalist, sleek). I couldn't afford anything from him at the time (his smaller items were sold out), but kept his card handy. I'll provide a link, in case anyone is interested.
I've just looked at his web site. Beautiful understated pieces and very good prices for the materials and the amount of work. Some of the handbags are under 150 EUR.
Coach is probably a bad example here because they are known for using high quality leather, and they are also among the less expensive "designer" brands (there are Coach leather purses in the $200-500 range, wheras you are looking at $2000-5000 for a brand like Louis Vuitton - also high quality leather, but not worlds apart from Coach). There is a huge amount of variability in quality of leather, from top grain to full grain to split grain, to "genuine" and "bonded."
In general though I agree with your point that it's possible to get the same quality as a luxury brand for cheaper, and luxury brands are about signalling, but it's a continuum. There are also plenty of "luxury" bag brands in the $200-500 range that use crummy leather and you'd be way better off with Coach (or a local artisan like you mentioned.)
I recently visited Hong Kong. In a mall I spotted a shop called Sinéquanone (sic). It was flogging "French fashion", quite pricy "French fashion". Who knows, it might be French inspired. You can tell its authentic French thanks to the e acute and the trailing e!
Sine qua non is Latin.
To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder. Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever! Who could forget the Rolls Royce Silver Mist? Mist in German means dung, manure or shit. Someone thankfully noticed before it was released (Frankfurt motor show) and it became the Silver Shadow. Then there was "Consignia" ...
> To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I once saw a boutique grocery store that had a wooden hanging-sign/plaque, and IIRC it was 1997 and the sign said "Since 1996."
Far more amusing were the businesses non-ironically translated as things like "1000 Golden Fortune"-something-or-other.
"1000 Golden Fortune" or Jolly good luck ... something. I think that's fair enough - translation of idioms is very hard when the languages are so far apart.
There's quite a lot of history involved too so that I suspect there are routine translations between the various Chinese languages eg Cantonese and Mandarin to English which might be a bit behind the times but they still work despite sounding a bit twee nowadays to the relevant ears.
> Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever!
Here in France, the daftest I've seen is the Audi e-tron, with etron meaning turd... Though it's been out of common use, so Audi just left the name as is.
Well that's me shot out of the water! It looks like someone bought a brand name and got it a bit wrong, through lack of understanding but who cares when the cash is running in and its not harming anyone.
Sadly this rings too true, rather closer to home. I own a smart new EV - an MG4. MG is a long standing British Marque. I know my car is largely Chinese.
I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK which is where the Morris Garage originated. My dad drove an MG Midgit in the '60s. My mum owned a Morris 1000 (Moggie). My granddad (Morris Oxford) ... well you get the idea.
In the end you have to decide for yourself exactly what you get when you buy a brand or even what a brand means in the first place.
I quite like my car but I do "firewall" it somewhat - I'm an IT consultant by trade.
Quality is not necessary for a good to be a luxury good. Only for demand to go up disproportionately with increases in income. Practically this means luxury goods are purchased to convey status. Consider Range Rover or Jaguar, which are known for being low quality but luxury brands.
Premium is the word that means paying extra for an increase in quality. Consider a Toyota vs a Kia.
These things are often correlated but don’t have to be.
I don’t know what to tell you for you to believe me but premium relating to quality and luxury relating to status are literally the way they’re defined in the retail goods and brand world.
the one that gets me (not furniture, but consumer good) is Yeti.
they seem to be slightly better made, but for SO MUCH more money. They have huge stores devoted to their products. Are people really spending money, and that much, on coolers?
We have a couple of Yeti coolers. They work really well, but they're heavy and have significantly less space inside than you'd expect by looking at them. Most importantly though, they look cool and have nice shiny and colorful exteriors.
I don't live in the Bay Area anymore, but once great thing about living there was the amount of secondhand West Elm / Williams Sonoma furniture for reasonable prices that you could buy from rich people. Most of their quality is a crapshoot but at the right price you can find good deals for some of their items.
About 8 or so years ago my wife and I were really excited to buy our first “adult” piece of furniture (read, not-ikea). And we found a leather sofa we loved the look of at West Elm. But it really sucked. Thankfully we had another room that needed to be furnished and we threw it in there. But the thing was just not comfortable and the pillows started sagging after minimal use.
Since then almost every other couch we got was from ikea, since if it ended up sucking at least we didn’t pay 2-3x the cost for it. Which is sad really, I want a nice couch. I just don’t that paying 10-20x the cost wind just be a piece of junk.
At least with most IKEA products you assemble them yourself, so the level of quality is immediately apparent, and the pricing reflects it. I appreciate that straightforward approach.
Most everything I've bought there has outlasted my desire to keep using it. There are the occasional problems, like a blue table where the veneer shows a bright white mark wherever it gets nicked, but I feel like many criticisms are unfounded and often come across as elitist.
Hmm I don't know if coming in from the bottom will get me the access I need, I'm afraid. I've got some bowing across the middle of the backrest. But, maybe I'll give it a go anyway! Thanks.
West elm has been pretty bad for most stuff for us too. Surprisingly we have an okay Urban couch from them that's held up well the last 5 years. The cushions haven't maintained their shape all that much and the feathers occasionally poke through which are my only complaints. Our little kids used to jump on it before we moved it downstairs so the frame was at least built well and it's still pretty comfortable.
Id never buy one again from them though after having everything else fail on us.
About 3 years ago after moving into a new house, I needed a new couch and wanted something that would wear reasonably well without getting into the higher end ($3k+). I found one on Apt2B which they were touting was built around an robotically-welded steel frame, lending to consistent durability. After reading many sofa reviews mentioning buckling particleboard, that sounded pretty good. There weren’t a ton of options due to pandemic shortages so I went for it, which cost me $1500.
It’s held up well so far. Cushions are showing some wear but nothing out of the ordinary, and the steel frame is indeed solid. It might even be worth reulphostering at some point down the road.
I would expect the seller to fix that. Furniture at that price should last much longer. Don't you have any concept of 'merchantable quality' in the US?
Eesh... I have a West Elm couch I got at an outlet for half off, so only $1200. It's fairly comfy and looks good, but I feel the back cushions will need to be restuffed sooner rather than later. I've had it less than a year.
The part about springs is interesting because all the sofas I've owned in the past decade have used foam, and I don't miss springs... When they are new maybe it's ok, but over time they wear out and the sofa becomes really noisy and uncomfortable as they aren't even. The same thing with mattresses, I'm never buying a sprung mattress again.
Let’s be real too: nobody’s going underneath the sofas at Crate and Barrel to see how they’re constructed. It doesn’t really matter that you can see and touch them.
I don’t even think the luxury brands are much better (e.g., RH). They’ll give you some solid woods and finer materials where you can see them. They are better but not by the amount I would like.
The cheapness isn’t something these manufacturers need to do, it’s just in their interest. Higher margins, more repeat purchases.
It’s not like salaries are high in big furniture production countries like Vietnam. They could do things in a more labor intense way and still make a profit. It’s just that they’ll make more money by making the construction cheap, and making a product that lasts decades is a good way to restrict future business.
> nobody’s going underneath the sofas at Crate and Barrel to see how they’re constructed.
I also don't really know what to look for. Most people don't.
In the past you could more or less rely on the store being somewhat reliable and somewhat trustworthy. I say "somewhat" because of course you wouldn't fully trust a salesman, but by and large: you could more or less trust that something was "quality" if it was advertised as such, and/or more expensive and the cheaper options, usually. You didn't need to have a Ph.D. in sofa construction to buy a decent sofa.
Now it's best to assume everything is a lie. Everyone is lying to your face, or just don't know what the they're talking about. Even expensive items marketed as "quality" cannot be relied on being quality at all.
Once upon a time a sofa was a product sold on the market because some people needed sofas, and some people and/or companies knew how to make them. "A fair product for a fair market-conform price". Classic capitalism and free-market economics where everyone wins.
But now it no longer matters if people need sofas, or whether anyone actually gets anything remote to a "fair deal", or any externalities like climate change, or if kids in Vietnam are being exploited. Burn the world, as long as I can sell my crummy sofa, because "free market allows it" is the only logical and moral argument that exists for some people. A sofa is no longer a product; it's just the means to making a profit. There's a subtle difference between to two.
All of this is part of "the financialisation of everything" and "toxic capitalism" that's been going on since the 80s.
>Burn the world, as long as I can sell my crummy sofa, because "free market allows it"
That is classic capitalism. Econ 101 notions of efficient free markets rely on all participants being perfect rational actors with perfect information. Snake oil salesmen have always relied on the fact that those assumptions are inaccurate.
I ordered a dresser once from a local store, they bought some cheap crap from Amazon and passed it off as "shipping from storage". It arrived broken and I couldn't get my money back, which I probably would have if I got something similar through an online retailer.
The article seems to exaggerate a bit, because neither in 2024, nor in 2004, would I have expected a $1,200 couch to be 'well-made'. (Although I wouldn't expect either one to actually fall apart in two years of use.)
In the Midwest, the "better" option is to buy furniture from "The Amish".
Parents bought a living room set, it was double what a similar set would be at the local furniture superstore, but the fabric/cushions were a new level of terrible. Basically fell apart in two years.
It's a great place to find wooden tables, beds, dressers, but it's all heavy (as you'd expect) and hard to move.
If I was buying a sofa today I would get something from Stressless.
Although the furniture quality is excellent, I worry about supporting child labor when doing business with the Amish. They pull their kids out of school after grade 8 to put them to work. I've also heard various things regarding the commonality of abusive practices within their religion. Trade-offs for everything!
I mean, to some extend, but I don’t necessarily think that working is bad for a 13 year old. If they can work in a supermarket to earn some side income they can work anywhere (under limited guidance).
When I was 15, my brain was definitely pubescent and far from fully developed.
But I was able to make some money by fixing computers or translating stuff from English to Czech anyway. There was no exploitation in those labor relations just because I was young.
I am not manually skilled, but I can definitely see someone at 15 making a nice chair or a table instead.
I don't think that 15 y.o.s should be treated as fully adult, some limitations on their work are perfectly OK (no ardous work, no work underground etc.). But barring them from working altogether will probably slow their development down. Not everything can be learnt from books or models, some real-world practice, including the most basic elements of interaction with customers/employers, is necessary.
Yes, but the same is true (a bit less so) of an 18 year old and most places allow 18 year olds to work, drive, vote, join the military, enter into binding contracts as adults etc.
While teenagers are not fully adult in some ways, they are also very different from a 12 year old.
So not far off compulsory school age in the UK, which is approximately 16. We do not get accused of child labour.
Until recently you could work once you left school. Now you cannot do a full time job until you are 18, but can become an apprentice (so you get some training as well as working). There is nothing to stop you doing nothing.
The requirement to not work until you are 18 has not been particularly beneficial. Brought to you (IIRC) by the same government that massively expanded the higher education system (a huge increase in the proportion of people going to university) for no real benefit.
Like hell it is. What they want their kids learning is irrelevant, it's a travesty of "religious freedom" that we don't require this cult to educate their children to the same uniform standard as every other person in our society.
I dropped out of school in 9th grade. I make $200K a year. A friend of mine has a college degree and has been unemployed for a year.
There is no uniform standard of education in the US. Kids in the South are being taught that evolution is on par with intelligent design. Poor black kids in Baltimore have on average a 3rd grade reading level in high school, while rich kids a few counties away are taught when to use a backdoor roth ira. Don't even mention "no child left behind".
I am happy with my Lovesac sofa, too. It was expensive, but I can't think of another product I could expect to be as happy with, so Lovesac seems to be in a class of their own and can demand whatever price they want.
In particular, it's comfortable, well built, but not bulky. I can take it apart move it in my regular sized SUV if needed. I move a lot, and eventually grew tired of bulky things that were difficult or impossible to move without professional help.
I also tried a Burrow sofa which has the same modular properties, but it was not comfortable at all and I had to return it
Most are cheap junk bought sight unseen. My stressless couches are built from real wood, full grain leather, etc... My eames chair likewise. But you're adding a 5-10x multiplyer to furniture costs for that quality.
I hear this a lot, but my fairly inexpensive IKEA sofa is about eight years old with no problems at all so far.
EDIT: Actually, in general I've found that my IKEA furniture has done pretty well (basically everything in the house is IKEA) with the sole exception of a "Lack" coffee table, whose surface is kinda disintegrating after 8 years (I think it's basically made of cardboard with a veneer...). The name should perhaps have been a warning.
I got an IKEA couch about 9 years ago. It was like... $700? The construction is definitely very cheap and you can tell if you flip it on its back, but it's very comfortable and sturdy enough that it still feels solid in normal use.
I don't think "cheap" construction is necessarily a bad thing, honestly. There's ways to do cheap construction such that it works just fine.
For some reason people hate IKEA in the US. Was trying to sell a standing desk I bought there for 750$ and nobody wanted it. Ended up selling it for 150$. I also had a Jarvis and it was gone in an instant, even though the IKEA one was much much better.
I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
I think a lot of this is attached to a puritan-based work ethic. If something isn't hard to do, or require a lot of time and energy then it's not of high quality or worth having.
Yes, Pax is only sturdy when mounted to a wall. It is very unstable by itself. But isn’t it meant to be permanently installed? I’m expecting to leave my Pax when I’m moving out.
IKEA is beloved by many in the US and generally one of the most specifically in-demand brands in the market for used contemporary furniture. You might just be in an unusual region or had some other reasons why your listings didn't perform the way you expected.
That said, I am one of those people who doesn't get a lot from them so I can speak to some of criticism. Part of it is just the aesthetic, and theirs doesn't match how I decorate my own space or what I usually feel good around. That's just the nature of aesthetics, though, and there's always going to be some difference in taste between any two people and any two regions.
As for quality, though, I think the critique you hear reflects the quality of their budget products. If you're eyeing modern or euro designs at a fancy furniture studio and then go to IKEA to find a cheap approximation, you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
That shouldn't rally be a surprise (cheap is cheap for a reason) and doesn't hold true for their mid-range and higher products. And heck, it's not even really fair when Walmart and Target furniture isn't any better, but it's enough to keep feeding the reputation.
I mean, it depends what you mean by ‘real quality’; you’re not going to get hand-crafted expertly made stuff that will last for centuries or anything. But for the price, their mid to high end stuff is excellent.
I don't mean anything like artisan or hand-crafted. I mean well-built, out of quality materials. A good quality table, for instance, should last decades.
I think a lot of their solid wood stuff (it’s not all chipboard!) would fit the bill, tbh. You do have to be slightly careful with the assembly (it’s not difficult, but some people like to treat the instructions as suggestions, and then get annoyed when it falls apart…)
I'm writing this comment sitting at a basic IKEA particleboard desk that I've had since 2014. It has survived daily usage for 10 years and 2 moves (one coast-to-coast). The only signs of wear is some scuffed paint where the hands rest in front of the keyboard and veneer is starting to peel slightly in one the corner.
Yeah, I have a couple of Ikea chairs in a room that replaced (cheap) wicker that was falling apart. They haven't been used hard but, to me, they were pretty inexpensive, look good, and are very comfortable.
On the other hand, I bought a dresser with a lot of particle board and, no, it's by no means well made. But it's in a bedroom and it works. I could have spent 4x (or more) for a nicely made hardwood dresser from a good New England brand. But even getting it into the bedroom upstairs might have been a bit of an adventure.
I think IKEA is sort of like the Toyota of furniture. It doesn't look amazing, but it's higher quality than the price would lead you to believe because they work very hard to design things economically.
It’s also engineered incredibly well. There are no weak points or flaws in the design. It feels like someone poured their heart and soul in to producing the absolute strongest and most practical item possible given the budget.
I am. So many other companies products seem to have one weak spot that completely ruins an otherwise strong design. Meanwhile ikea stuff seems perfectly designed for the material budget.
God no, it's awful. At least 50% too small in all dimensions. It's a chair that deliberately ignores that someone larger than 160cm 50kg girl might sit on it.
If one wants durable from IKEA, shop by material. They have sheet steel and solid wood that will outlast any particle board. The steel is a little thin on the budget line and the wood is not very aesthetic for some tastes, but they usually have options that last or outperforms more expensive particle board furniture that are more complex due to aesthetics. Hell even plastic there is fine, so many cafes with shitty beater IKEA cafe furniture.
The other thing you can do is glue-and-screw instead of just using the screws. I’ve had a bookshelf or two break due to the screws blowing out of the chipboard during a move. Using regular wood glue/PVA meant that that never happened again although it also means you can’t disassemble it. Disassembling is kind of overrated though, the screws don’t ever go in as tight the second time, especially after it’s been sitting loaded with books for a few years.
Oh, yeah, I discovered this not because I thought staples would be stronger but because I built one shelf first and was tired of trying to nail those stupid brad nails in by hand... so for the next shelf I pulled out the staple gun. Was so impressed with how much more rigid it felt that I went behind the other shelf and drove a bunch of staples through the backing cardboard :)
When replacing screws in soft material, I slowly turn them to the left to feel when they drop into the existing thread rather than making new grooves. And in my experience, IKEA furniture reassembles fine multiple times. You also have to make sure such screws are and remain tight, because if they start getting loose that working back and forth will destroy the threads of the softer material. If a piece of furniture isn't solid, figure out why and shore it up before it gets progressively worse.
> you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
I'm not going to argue too much with this, but I think this is underselling Ikea quite a bit.
Their cheap stuff is definitely made out of cheap materials. But I've found it to be well-engineered compared to walmart with reinforcements in critical places and general overall good quality control (doesn't come pre-scratched).
Walmart-level furniture on the other hand is often designed to look a certain way, with no consideration for how loads will be placed on it or long-term durability.
For what it's worth I've had better luck with Walmart furniture than Ikea, but that was because I was careful about the Walmart stuff and just trusted the Ikea would be fine.
I feel like the cheapest thing in a certain price category in IKEA is "doesn't survive two moves" stuff, but everything above it is ... basically fine. Like it's a table, there's only so many ways to put 4 metal bars and a piece of wood on top. It'll be fine.
I think more than a bit of it is typical American trademark laziness and inability to follow directions. I see so many of the bookcases without the backing sheet on them. Even if it's just thin cardboard, it provides a lot more of the structural integrity than you might think. The point is to keep the cubes from deforming and having a progressive failure.
I think the reason for this is simple: Ikea does make some pretty poor-quality furniture, but it's often on the floor right next to some very well-built stuff that will last for many years.
Price is sometimes an indicator (I bought two Ikea dressers ~15 years ago; I kept the cheaper one for only a few years while the more expensive one is still going strong) but not always (my 18-year-old sofa was the entry-level option at the time).
Back in 2012 I furnished a home with Ikea furniture.
Yes I hate them.
You'd spend $60 on a book case and spend the next 4 hours trying to understand what the instructions mean and how to build it. You also needed a partner to hold corners together.
Now today, the furniture instructions are better and instead 16 different weird fastener, there are 8.
Its a frustration thing. Ikea didn't really do anything but be low cost. We blame Ikea like we blame Walmart for having drug addicts.
I think this every time I built something ikea, then I build something from another brand and I discover a new abyss, then I go back to ikea. It's a cycle.
Yeah, I’m not particularly handy (I break out in a cold sweat whenever anything requires more than trivial assembly), but I’ve never had any issue with assembling Ikea stuff.
I know these people. They aren’t stupid. Many of them just aren’t good at visualizing things they haven’t done or been shown before.
They may know X should go into Y but the task is so unfamiliar or counter to how they think that they hit their working memory limit before it makes sense to them.
Impatience just makes that worse.
IKEA’s instructions are extremely helpful in this case.
I love IKEA instructions and construction. I honestly get a buzz from the puzzle. If I have to construct more than one of an item then I'll compete with myself on speed and efficiency.
It's basically Lego for adults (which was more exciting until Lego pushed its market into the adult demographic).
Which is actually part of Ikea's brand identity. When you put it together yourself, you feel closer to the furniture than if someone just plonked it at your house. OTOH, if you hate that kind of thing, you'll never go back, but I guess they have an assembly service these days.
$750 for an IKEA desk is crazy money. Does it have hydraulics to raise and lower the desk?
But depreciation on IKEA is huge because while it can last a long time within a household, it moves very poorly so if it has been moved or reassembled once or twice, it’s likely near end of life. But hard to evaluate that, it’s not like it has an odometer — hence value for used it very low.
Ikea's goods usually come in different price ranges with the most expensive often not being 'cheap' but 'cheap given the quality'.
That being said, often their cheapest stuff is the best value for money because it's so cheap that it lasting more than a year would be a miracle (but they usually do!).
Yeah, ikea standing desk prices are crazy. There are plenty of comparable products on Amazon for a lot less money. I kept looking at them in the store thinking that there must be something that could warrant the price, but I just can't see it.
It really depends. IKEA runs the entire range of very temporary to actually pretty good. The trick is knowing which is which, although price points are usually a good indicator.
Yeah, I dunno, maybe it’s different stuff in the US? I know at least some of the items are different.
With the exception of the aforementioned table (which I think cost about 8 euro at the time, so, really, what did I expect) I’ve found all their stuff to be of very decent quality, certainly better than what you could get from ‘traditional’ furniture stores at the same price.
Same here — I have an Ikea bedframe that’s nearly a 2 decades old at this point and has moved four times. An office chair lasted me 7 years. Bookcases over a decade old.
I grew up in a nearly all Ikea household, and it’s only later in life I have discovered their reputation.
You don't have to. Every IKEA store has shortcuts to quickly go to the section you want. And at the start, after the stairs usually, you can go directly to the restaurant and to the small stuff section, if you want to skip the furniture show rooms completely.
> I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.
The thing is, antique stores are stuffed to the gills with heirloom class furniture, and it doesn’t cost 100x the amount. Gorgeous solid cherry, mahogany, etc, where even the backs and drawer bottoms are solid can be had for a song. We recently tried to find a mostly solid wood IKEA dresser, but because they’re switching all their designs to new anti-tip designs over the next few months, almost everything was out of stock. So we decided to look a bit further afield, and we went to our local antique shop. We ended up spending $600 for a totally refinished solid cherry dresser, delivered into our room. It’s stunning, totally solid cherry, and I think slightly less expensive than the IKEA dresser we were trying to get. Not spending 2 hours cranking screws was a really nice bonus.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s necessarily true everywhere. We replaced our IKEA (or equivalent) stuff with solid wood antiques and they were all $1000+. We had only two items to really replace, but compared to the $50 that the IKEA stuff cost it was quite an expense.
Yeah, maybe this place was unusually cheap, but chatting with the owner made it sound like the supply far outstripped the demand, so I don’t think that’s fundamentally true. That said, I’d still take the $1000 solid antique over the $600 mostly solid IKEA piece.
In the US alot of peoples first experience with Ikea is buying the cheapest desk, couch, bookcase, etc. for a dorm room or first apartment. And those are largely trash that won't survive a move, spilled water, accidental bump, etc.
They have a line of pine furniture I like, as well as other things that are solid for the price (their kitchen cabinets) but you only have one chance to make a first impression as they say.
I dislike their engineered wood stuff. It’s decent for furnishing an apartment but for more permanent things real hardwood just feels nicer, and IKEA has relatively few options with that material.
I had an engineered wood bed frame from them split in half, whereas an older IKEA pine (not hardwood but whatever) bed frame still lives on.
After a lot of digging a few years ago, I settled on the IKEA Finnala. So far it's held up pretty well.
It's not as well made as quality pieces, but I worked from the assumption that any couch I bought would be trash. Some of the nice things about a buying into a system like the Finnala are that when an arm, cushion, cover, or whatever fails, I can just replace that piece; there are aftermarket covers and legs; if I move it can be disassembled; and if a new place is smaller, the whole thing doesn't have to be trashed.
I love quality furniture, but it doesn't always fit the bill for a society where people can't afford a single family house or put down roots. (Note: that still doesn't necessarily justify all the items being sold today that are destined for a landfill in a few years.)
I have an Ikea Lillberg sofa from 2005 that I never dreamed I would hold onto as long as I have.
Every time I've moved, I think this will be the time I replace it, but the joinery has stayed rock-solid, the wood has aged beautifully (though I admit this is likely owing to a lack of pets or children) and even the upholstery has never pilled or visibly worn (though I keep thinking about ordering a replacement slipcover set from Comfort Works, which makes aftermarket upgrades for long-since-discontinued Ikea products). And the minimalist, Danish-influenced style somehow never looks out of place no matter what else I put around it.
This article has me thinking I may yet keep the Lillberg for years to come.
You're quite correct about the Lack. They're cheap as hell (15 bucks at time of writing?), but as a result quite manipulatable, such as creating 3d printer enclosures [0]. You can see some of their insides as they go through the process.
I still own some Billies made in 1995 or so by Ikea. Literally massive wood and damn good book shelves.
The ones bought by me in 2008 or so very noticeably less well build but still ok.
The ones we bought in 2018 or so are shit, especially the shelves are so thin that they begin to sag.
In 2008 or so a friend of mine bought a "kallax" (another name then) and it was awesome, it's still in his basement and looks good. We bought one in 2023 and it's basically only paint, some "wood" and air. It's ok to store stuff in, but it's impossible to drill a screw into the wood. It's like trying to screw paper.
KALLAX used to be EXPEDIT. Both were made from honeycombed cardboard (mostly air, as you say) covered with very thin sheets of painted MDF. Maybe there was a time EXPEDIT was more solid, but I had one in the 1990s, and it was just like this.
You can drill the thin wood in IKEA furniture like this, but you have to reinforce it.
IKEA has always had a mix of wobbly instacrap and solid stuff. I remember they made a short-lived modular shelf called BRODER [1], which was solid steel and came in wall-mounted or freestanding configurations, the kind of solid thing you want in a garage or storage space. I was shocked at how high-end it was. It was discontinued to cost and low sales.
Thanks, that's fascinating. Ar least in my recollection, the expedit I knew was comparable to a Billy in wood density, but I might be mistaken - it's nearly twenty years.
Funnily, the most sturdy piece of furniture we own is from Ikea. Two massive desks build from solid steel frames and a plate made with wood furnishing. Totally indestructible, weighs a ton and was made by Ikea in the 99s or so. Funnily enough, we didn't even know that they where from Ikea. We inherited them from my father in law and were cursing their weight like "man I wish Ikea made this, than it would be easier to carry". After dismantling them for transport we discovered various Ikea stickers. Sadly we don't know the model, just that they where manufactured by Ikea.
The most endurable piece of furniture I know of is the kitchen of my mother in law. Made in the 70s or so it uses resopal finishing and the counters itself looks like new, despite years of heavy use and non stop smoking.
Honestly those cubes at least the 4x4 are perfectly fine. And cardboard is a hell of a lot more sustainable than solid wood and probably particle board
Structurally they're fine, and can hold a fair amount of weight. Just treat them well; don't cut/drill into them or let them near water (the cardboard gets soft), don't overload them, and don't move/lift them while they're filled with heavy objects. While they're cheaply made, they're not among IKEA's worst products, I think.
Kallax redesign thinned out outer walls of previous Expedite by 1cm so it looks closer to the thickness of the shelves and dividers. Also saves on a lot of material I imagine with the volumes involved. Also soften edges to be kid friendly and more scratch resistent finish. Cheaper, looks more aesthetically balanced IMO, and basically as statically strong holding stuff and doing furniture work. But thinner walls makes difficult/wobbly moving in larger 4x4, 5x5 variations.
I had to cinched a band of webbing around the outside of the shelf during move to prevent it from falling apart. Gluing all the dowels/joints/connection also helps with strength a lot, but who has time for that.
I have a lot to complain about their decline in quality (at least with IVAR they realized they've gone too far and reintroduced metal rails) - but don't diss my boy EXPEDIT/KALLAX. :)
IMO, it's one of their most brilliantly engineered pieces of furniture.
Sure, it's engineered to be cheap - but definitely not cheaply engineered. The whole geometry etc. is designed around what is possible with the materials.
They are really low-priced, versatile, easy to move, and TBH, for veneered cardboard it has no right to still be this sturdy, especially the 2x4 and smaller variants - and as another poster has said, even the large ones, as long as you don't try to move them around with heavy stuff inside. Just be dilligent when assembling and see that the screws are tightened really well.
I avoided the LACK after seeing someone spill drink and watching it bubble up like paper.
My coffee table is still from IKEA, but it’s metal. I’ve had it for 11 years now. It’s on wheels and some of them look like they’ve seen some stress over the years… and it’s been moved to 8 homes in those 11 years, which could have been the cause. But it still works great and I don’t know the the average person visiting my home would notice that.
I have been thinking of getting something a little larger and more grown up, but I love the functionality of the wheels, how it can get out of the way, and that I don’t have to baby it. It doesn’t look like they sell it anymore, but it was $40 well spent.
Also… I haven’t priced out Lack tables in a while but it looks like they’re still only $20?! I last bought one in probably 2006 and they were $20CAD at the time.
At some point in my twenties, I decided it was time to upgrade from my broke college student IKEA lifestyle which to me meant West Elm. Every thing I got from West Elm was absolute garbage and none of it lasted more than a handful of years.
Now I'm in the prime of my career and could move up to something actually nice if I really wanted to, like Design Within Reach (truly the most ironic business name in existence). But it's just so hard for me to justify a 5x or more price jump, when, honestly, the IKEA furniture I have has been so good.
I have a decade-old IKEA couch that is still in great shape despite surviving cats, dogs, young children, a snoring spouse who slept on it every night for about a year, and being mostly occupied throughout the entire pandemic. It's a tank, and still looks good to me.
I think I've committed myself to having a style that is basically "IKEA + some vintage stuff" which seems to work well quality wise and is about an order of magnitude cheaper than getting new quality non-IKEA furniture.
I've found Ikea furniture is great and lasts a long time as long as you don't move it to another apartment, that seems to really stress the joints and it will get rickety after 2-3 moves.
Ditto, my kivik has lasted so well that i didnt have the heart to get rid of it. It helps that there are many stores that sell custom covers of all kinds of fabrics.
IKEA has also however gone downhill compared to ~10 years ago, however. A Poang today, compared to 10 years ago: does not have beveled edges on the wood (which makes it look cheaper and feel less 'soft'), and is even slightly narrower, so that the old cushions dont really fit in the new one.
I think we are seing the effect of increasing prices and breakdown of global supply chains there
I have two pre-WWII Gispen chairs with thick foam seats, and only recently (last couple years) they started to dry out (become 'crispy' at the top surface). I suspect it is because I am not actively using them anymore, rather than because of their age.
I second your comment on high-quality foam. If you're looking at re-doing some old furniture or having your own made, study up on foam - not just the density - which is important - but also the type and grade. Decent stuff should last 25+ years - and be more comfortable along the way.
(A little tip - the density you want for proper comfort varies by the thickness of the cushion, the weight of the intended users, and the whether it's the seat bottom or the back. The back needing a softer foam.)
Made the mistake of buying a couch off Wayfair for a little nook in my office. It lasted a year before I got rid of it. Never again. Couches really are one of those areas where you get what you pay for. With the possible exception of Ikea. Got an Ikea couch for my 10 year old's room and its holding up remarkably well.
Maybe I got lucky, but I am quite happy with the desk I got from wayfair a couple years ago. It may not be fancy, but it's sturdy, durable, customizable, and probably less than half the cost of a high-end solid hardwood desk.
Next time you stay at a mid-range or better hotel, notice the furniture. They don't but junk because in the long run it never lasts, and whose going to pay for a nice hotel room with tacky furniture?
A couple of months ago, we stayed in a newer Holiday Inn Express. The bed and cabinets were very nice and well built.
Or common areas in offices / apartment buildings.
For example, the building I live in has nice couches that look like they can take a lot of traffic.
I once looked at the brand tag - Ligne Roset. It’s not cheap, but at least does seem high quality.
They revamp furniture more often than you might realize, because even great quality stuff looks tired and worn after awhile. Investigate and you can usually find the liquidator in your area that handles them.
About 10 years ago I went shopping at Furnitureland South, mentioned in the article. The selection was a bit overwhelming, but we picked out a solid wood bedroom set from a manufacturer in Canada. It's held up great, as has my kids' IKEA bedroom furniture.
I've purchased couches from West Elm, Restoration Hardware, and a few other well-known places, and they've all been disappointing. From now on I'll stick to Furnitureland and IKEA, but I don't know if I have the energy to go couch shopping at Furnitureland.
Our kids destroy all the nice furniture (dumb ways, like sitting on couch soaking wet from the pool, spilling food, drawing on the cushion while doing homework or a project, doing gymnastics off the cushions, fort building). They aren’t actively destructive like attacking with scissors but I can’t see investing in nice furniture until they are adults (even teens can be rough as you can imagine). By then, I don’t know if I’ll care?
This is a good dig into changes in design and manufacturing trends, which makes sense for Dwell, but I suspect we'd see more people complaining about their furniture quality these days even without manufacturing changes because many people are like 50% heavier than the people in sitting in couches 50 years ago -- and often more likely to collapse into a sofa than to set themselves down upon it.
So it's actually kind of a two sided loss in quality: the designs are flimsier even while the engineering requirements have become more demanding.
I can’t read the site due to a massive “We value your privacy” pop up informing me about the 1532 data-harvesting “partners” they sell information to, and there’s only “Allow All” button accessible (which is illegal by GDPR).
They really value my privacy, for its resale value.
Because people don't want to pay for good plywood, proper webbing, and quality fabrics. Real furniture weighs a lot, and doesn't make sense to ship around the planet.
Thus, people get foam, OSB, and cardboard in a fake canvas bag.
Good upholsterers are hard to find, often eccentrics, and usually will not tolerate cheapskates. If you own something pricey like a boat or restaurant, than most are happy to get something that will last. Even a few yards of period correct fabrics or leather is more expensive than the typical Ikea living room set.
One needs to learn these things if you want to stay married. lol =)
I look through the antiques subreddit often and lots of really nice quality furniture is hardly valued now because it's out of style. A good quality sofa should be able to be re-foamed and fabriced forever but I think we're all just too mindset on cheap and disposable since that's the easiest route.
We bought some sofas secondhand when moving into our first home. They were great, and they held up well for many years. But ultimately we sold them and bought new ones because we didn't know if they had the fire-retardant chemicals that used to be mandated in CA (until they were discovered to be carcinogenic). The new sofa (from Costco) seems good but the sofa chairs (from Wayfair) are not so good.
It seems like the frame in the back has some sort of support that is made out of a material that is closer to cardboard than wood. When our kids run into it, the back of the chair deforms a bit and has to be bent back. I have no idea why the frame of a chair would be made out of something so weak. I expect we'll have to replace them in 5 years or so, and we'll aim for something more old-school.
Sofa bases seems to be getting shitter and shitter as manufactures value engineer with increasingly more low quality engineered wood. At this point my next sofa frame is going to be sturdy metal outdoor furniture. I've also seen a few tiktok sponcon videos of sofas with industrial plastic molded frame, like industrial pallets. Probably not enviromentally friendly, but seems durable.
Seems like Sofas are last to make the economical steel channel furniture jump, you can get tons of sturdy/durable bedframes for like $100 shipped on Amazon. Most cheap metal futon frames also last forever if it wasn't for the moving mechanical components. I'd like to see more steel + bolt sofas.
Last time I bought a couch, a new one, it set me back $6,000. It took me the better part of eight months to find it. Solid wood. Proper joinery. Thick padding. Pig skin leather. We kept it for 20 years before giving it to some friends who had it reupholstered where I expect it will last another 20 years.
I used to have some expensive, but ultimately crap, book cases. Book cases are not designed by people who own a lot of books. 36" to 48" spans of fast growth pine will stretch and bow within a year or two. I designed my own book case. I went to a furniture making store. We went back and forth a few times. The biggest sticking point that took four attempts for the furniture maker to understand was where to put the fixed shelf. It does not go in the middle because that wastes space. We made it out of pine. 7' 8" tall, so that when standing it up, it will clear an 8ft ceiling in modern American homes. 22" wide shelves so they cannot flex. Fixed shelf to counteract gravity. Made specifically to carry paperback novels and similarly sized books. "Sand it three times, prime it, sand it, prime it, sand it, paint it, sand it, paint it, no I don't care that a single book case will cost $200." I bought 24 of them. Many hundreds of lineal feet of book cases. We still have them 24 years later and they are as good as new. And the paint job, because it is two layers of prime and two layers of paint, on a mirror surface, looks like you just took the item from the showroom floor.
I have a plywood bookcase I made to store cooking books. The cheapest plywood you can imagine from the big box store. But because of the structural design, 15 years later it still holds up without any bowing or flexing.
Modern furniture is absolute junk. Even the "good stuff."
The issue is that most modern households in the U.S. can not hack that kind of pricetag for a sofa / couch. Hell, I could never spend that kind of jack on a couch, even if I literally saved up for it (which would take years)... it is just far too much of a percentage of my income for one furniture item.
So, how do we solve that issue (e.g. its good, but if it is 10% of your gross annual income, how could you afford it)? Either people need to get paid more, or ???
I read a book about chairs a few months ago, and one bit from it is
> Eighteenth-century furniture was expensive. At a time when a journeyman joiner earned three livres a day, a good-quality armchair might cost as much as a hundred livres.
No matter how much money I make, I like to think there's price-tags I'd still balk at just because I don't want to be a sucker. Or get involved in status-signaling.. not sure which is worse.
So I started thinking about comparisons also. I like to go back to cups of coffee, and you could spend 6 bucks on coffee easily.. is a piece of furniture worth a thousand cups? Maybe. On the other hand, you could own like 3 cargo containers for this cash (think of the material involved), or a used car (think of the utility!).
So nah, this feels like way too much money, unless it's a mint condition antique that some king and queen used to sit on. A huge Belffin modular super sofa with 9 seats and 2 ottomans is less than $2k.
We drive a second-hand Toyota that we paid cash for. The previous car we racked up 200,000 miles before deciding to "upgrade." I wear worn out Skechers sneakers that have seen better days. The leather belt that holds up my pants is getting on for 20 years old. The red sweatshirt I am currently wearing is stained with paint and varnish and food, and has at least three holes in it.
I pay, very rarely, for good coffee outside of the home. I prefer the coffee I make at home. It costs me around 8c per cup, 12c if I steam some milk. Some really good beans that cost around $25 a pound. Admittedly the coffee is made on a Jura X8, or a WEGA espresso machine at the RV.
Nobody really comes in our house, so we're not status signalling to anyone other than this casual mention on social media about some stuff. Money is a tool, and deployed properly, can bring a lot of leverage to problems.
You're free to make a judgement, and would probably blow a gasket knowing what I dropped on three office chairs, but at the end of the day, I used the tools I have at my disposal.
We need to raise the living wage, and the living standard of our people. But that's a separate discussion. The couch was not 10% of my gross annual income.
If you simply raise wages, then the people that make the furniture will also have their wages raised - which will increase the cost even further - it doesn't solve this problem and may even make it worse.
My media consumption habits went off a cliff since the pandemic due to life circumstances. I am slowly picking up the pace again. I have read around 3,500 books, not all of which I keep on the shelves. A nearly complete list with reviews of many of them are on one of my personal blogs.
...not to mention furniture stores seem to keep no inventory, so you get it 6-8 weeks after you buy because that's how it takes them to build and ship your new couch
One of the draws of the DTC model (and IKEA) is the apparently heavily commission-based pay structure of the sales staff of most brick-and-mortar furniture stores.
This article about about sofas opens with "The most important piece of furniture in your home..."
Did anyone else find this weird / funny?
Like, just off the top of my head I'd put my bed at the top of my list, waaaay ahead of a sofa. Next might be the desk & chair I WFH at, and then it goes on from there.
I get that the article wants to build engagement by "raising the stakes", but c'mon. Sofas are not that important :)
I get there would be some caveats here, but when it comes to furniture others see, for most beds and office chairs are down on the list. Of furniture guests are apt to see and use the sofa is pretty high up.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadI've been pretty stunned during my travels to find that it's really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk. No other culture seems nearly as interested, and some actively discourage it in favor of more real, personal topics. It's one of those things where once you start noticing it, it just gets cringier and cringier.
Not everyone lives in sitcoms or spends all their free time watching TV...
The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over. And even then we're usually doing other things than just lazing about.
> I've been pretty stunned during my travels to find that it's really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk.
It's a slight exaggeration, but yeah. I've really started noticing it on HN and some news-ish sites too, over the past couple of years: where a book would normally be used as a reference point, now a film is more commonly used instead.
Maybe it's hindsight bias on one of our parts.
You make it sound like this is not merely a rare thing for you, but that it should be rare... I don't just passively sit and watch much television and yet I have spent an incredible amount of time in my life sitting on either my couch or the couch of a friend -- or even one of many couches at an office -- talking and laughing and having fun with other human beings. If I had to choose only one: a couch or a dining table, I'd go with a couch. Now... bed? That's harder for me, but I can totally see people deciding couch (as you can sleep on the couch but it is awkward as hell to invite people over and only have a bed to use).
For instance, people come by all the time to play pool. Does that mean I should advocate that pool tables are important things to have in the home?
Yes. Write your own Dwell magazine and advocate for whatever you wish.
I think you may be engaging in a bit of axe grinding here! I agree that the sofa is one of the post important pieces of furniture in my home [1], but for reasons that have nothing to do with television. There is no TV in the room! But it is still where I spend the most time sitting during downtime, reading books, talking to my family, etc. And when I have friends over, we're either there or at the dining room table.
[1] For the title of the most important, I might have picked my bed. But that's a quibble.
That's quite a leap. Did you consider that dwell.com might not have actually done a study on what Americans consider the "most important piece of furniture" but just used that phrase to justify the very existence of their article?
For one, it doesnt seem like americans are significant outliers in tv consumption[1] or smartphone usage[2]. For another, yeah if you're a foreign traveller people probably aren't going to make small talk with you about TV or other pop culture...
[1]https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-watches-th...
[2] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats#smar...
Americans constantly shove TV into the conversation even if they don't know that the other person or people are familiar with it. Though many are aware of American media output by virtue of the cultural colonialism enacted since brute force fell out of fashion. Even if they're not explicitly speaking about TV they're still doing the IRL version of posting reaction GIFs by quoting memes in response to earnest conversation.
You don't think there is a strong correlation between how people spend their time and what they talk about?
If anything, TV has become dramatically less of a shared cultural experience for Americans since the post-network era began.
My family doesn't watch TV. I purchased my sofa when I didn't even have a TV.
The most important aspect of my living room arrangement is how well it facilitates long, deep, conversations with friends who come over for visits.
I have 3 pieces of seating in my living room, a chair for reading placed next to a book case (large enough that a couple small kids can sit in the lap of an adult who is reading with them if so desired), a smaller 2 person sofa, and a larger 6ft long sofa.
I know plenty of other families who have similar arrangements with sofas so placed as to emphasize socialization with friends.
Now if we are talking about the 90s and early 2000s, yeah, it was all about amazing TV watching experiences.
> The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over. And even then we're usually doing other things than just lazing about.
The couch is where you retire to after dinner has been finished and everything cleaned away. Board games may occur in other rooms (depending on one's coffee table situation) the of course a room that is laid out for conversation is going to see the most use when there are people over to have a conversation with.
FWIW now that I have a kid, I am hosting social events more often than ever before (watching children has a negative co-efficient for small values of n > 1, 3 kids are easier to watch than 1!), but even in my DINK life (at which point I didn't even own a TV), my couch got plenty of use.
In any case, even though there is nothing on television I watch with any regularity currently, I would still rate my sofa as a fairly important piece of furniture. Not as important as my bed, but it is the largest piece of furniture and the centerpiece of my largest room. My kitchen/living room is open floor plan townhouse and I cook quite a bit, and I can't just stand all day, so that's where I rest, even though I'm just listening to music when I do so and not watching television. When I lay down to read a book, that's also usually where I do it. If I take a nap during the day, it's typically on the sofa. We usually eat dinner there, too, even though we're not watching television, just because it's more comfortable than any other place we have to sit. I even work from my sofa pretty frequently.
But I've got no complaints, personally. I paid $300 or so at the PX when I joined the Army almost 20 years ago and bought my first house and still have the same sofa. It certainly didn't fall apart on me. It's moved with me four times. My wife and I debate getting a nice one but always decide not to because our cats are going to tear it up and puke on it all the time anyway.
Frankly, we'd probably use it a little less if our dining chairs were more comfortable, and I do think there's a very good case to be made that dining room chairs are more important than the sofa, but nonetheless, I really don't think a sofa is especially tied to TV culture in any way.
If we're going to be doing something rather than lazing around or eating, we're not going to be in the house at all.
Got this one in 2016 for $1,100, and it’s survived 2 kids with minimal pilling. It won’t impress anyone, but I have no problem using it.
https://www.ikeaddict.com/ikeapedia/en/Product/60276883/us-e...
I have no way of discerning furniture/fabric quality, and no one offers long warranties, so I don’t see a reason to spend more than IKEA prices.
[1] https://www.dwr.com/living-sofas-sectionals/quilton-chaise-s...
West Elm and the whole Pottery Barn set of brands are just worse versions of Crate and Barrel, with terrible customer service to go with it. They had some of the most mean and rude customer service agents I’ve ever talked to. They acted like the store was an entirely different company, then the store acted like I needed to call the national call line. Plus, they outsource deliveries in a very annoying blame-shifting way.
At least at RH you get a single human point of contact who can handle everything like a concierge experience.
The only problem I have with them is that they have almost no couch designs that have a more plush style. Almost all of them are firmer foams and just plain not appealing designs.
$2700 is what I got mine for. I think price might have been lowered to $2300 now.
It's built in Poland. Solid wood with steel reinforcement in the form of steel tubing in places, springs, and then a pillow system on top of that. The firm making it is the Swedish company SITS.
But I think one has to actually sit in a bunch of couches to see whether they're good.
They're made from recycled materials and are vegan. So far they've been great, and they have a 15 year guarantee, but time will tell.
https://habbio.co.uk/
The whole thing is just stapled together OSB.
I ripped the dust cover off and added 3 new frame stretchers made from 2x8 construction lumber (and tied other loose joints back together) and its done pretty well since then: https://imgur.com/a/bqlLgW3 (wish I'd gotten a few more pictures, but I was tired by this point). Just shocking how terrible the construction is.
We know more now (and could afford better) whenever we have to finally replace this, but $2000 is a not-insignificant investment that shouldn't be a complete piece of crap.
But I have no idea where to go for this. The overlap between junk and luxury is too large nowadays.
I've noticed a very prevalent "hail corporate" subculture on reddit that put me off believing anything anyone said.
For quality modern furniture, the only game in town around me is Room & Board. The last couch we bought there was ~$6k[0]. It's a lot, but we'd honestly been eyeing it for almost 20 years and it'll likely be something we have for another 20 years or more.
https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/sofas-and-lovese...
High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades.
Nice materials + pretty design does not necessarily result in a good product.
Having done a bit of woodworking as a hobby, I would say that hardwood could be inappropriate if it is used for an element that is purely structural, internal (and thus will be hidden by external features) and there are cheaper alternatives that are just as good, or stronger materials available and we are talking about a critical structural element.
That's a pretty abstract answer but it's always going to depend on the specific project. Sometimes a piece of furniture has no hidden internal structure, or the appeal of the furniture is that it is all bare wood and you want it made entirely out of a beautiful "furniture grade" hardwood. For certain upholstered furniture, such as many sofas, using expensive materials for inner framing could not only be superfluous and add unnecessary cost to the piece, but in certain circumstances there may be better materials available even if you could make a perfectly adequate structural support that will last a lifetime using expensive hardwood and the right joinery for critical stress points.
I read amulto's point as being "expensive material and fancy joinery doesn't matter if you have a weak design."
So the grain needed to run horizontally in the horizontal part to support the bending load. It was probably best for the grain to be vertical in the vertical part, although that was maybe less critical: that section was mostly in compression. It probably also looked better that way.
In any case, the actual construction put a finger joint in the horizontal section just past the turn, so a tiny bit of vertical grain wood extended horizontally over the turn. And several of the legs cracked just along the side of the finger joint, and one failed completely after about a month of gentle use.
The design plausibly could have worked if the joint went diagonally through the turn or was below it. But plywood is strong along both in-plane axes, and the legs could likely have been cut in single pieces from sheets of plywood with strength to spare.
Attractive plywood, even from hardwood species, is readily available. The plies are visible along the cut edge, but this is actually a style people like, especially in Scandinavian furniture. Even IKEA sells some nice chairs with plywood elements, at entirely reasonably price points.
Teak especially is so good at dealing with water that it was harvested to near extinction in the 19th century just to build ship's decks and cabins out of it.
Especially when thin, wood is surprisingly easy to break, and it doesn't handle being pulled on very well at all.
The problem with knots is that they resist drilling and screwing. The problem with new growth is that the pith is the weakest part of the wood, and new growth has the most pith.
Still, it's not a weak and terrible pos wood-like material like 1990's MDF, it will probably be ok for most uses as long as the grain direction is respected in regards to shear direction (typically you want the grain direction to run perpendicular to the shear forces) and everything is properly braced.
But they didn’t think very hard — see my other comment. I don’t think a single solid piece of hardwood would have performed a whole lot better. Either metal reinforcement or plywood or much more carefully considered joinery was needed.
That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn their leftover product to protect some secret of Dr Who purses that are bigger or magically organized on the inside, but because the entire value of the brand is "I can afford this and you cannot"
Luxury has ALWAYS been about signalling and displaying status and power. It's always about rubbing the prole's faces in their supposed supremacy. Remember, they have money because they are better than you, definitely not because there are systems and structures in place that make it easier to get rich for the already wealthy and connected.
Unfortunately it seems so many people really struggle to understand that while quality often costs a lot, costing a lot does not imply quality in any way. If you can afford to spend oodles on marketing for your product, you probably aren't spending as much on quality as people assume you would.
Quality goods are well-designed, well-made, etc. And you can't be sure about quality based on price.
Not sure why Coach was chosen for this example - I don't believe they are expensive; last I checked they were in the range of $200-500, which doesn't seem egregious as the actual luxury brands (ex. Hermes, where the entry level bags are $4,000).
That said, I feel there is a real difference in quality at various price points, and focusing on the material ("magic leather") is wrong. When I'm paying a premium I'm usually looking for in the dimensions of construction, and usually that means paying an actual professional who may charge $100/hr, vs 19 year old in Bangladesh. The two might be using the same material but the price difference comes from the person assembling the item.
The problem is you have a ton of companies (even "luxury" ones), that in an attempt to juice their stock price, have also focused on getting costs super low and are now using the same factories as junk brands but just slapping their logo on it. Even products of the same brand can vary wildly in quality depending even on the year it was made.
I have jackets from "luxury" brands that I bought 10 years ago that still look brand new for thousands of dollars (and probably saved money in the long run), but buying a similar item new or even trying to replace it is impossible.
Other brands are catching on. I hear Porsche (or at least some dealerships) have started gatekeeping 911s this way.
A Toyota Corolla probably ticks more boxes for the average person than any Porsche if cars are not your thing.
Your model 3 can't handle a corner. The reason car enthusiasts like Porsches is that they handle particularly well.
Even their models that share platforms with “lesser” brands in the corporate stable go through a lot to differentiate them.
But if you don’t care about cars or enjoy driving, then all of it is a moot point and probably meaningless to you, and you might as well enjoy a Toyota Camry and call it a day.
This is a very ironic comment to have made in a thread about how cheap things aren’t as good as they seem once you look a bit deeper.
Daily reminder that your "super cars" are worthless. Merging onto the highway is far more important than "winning in the corners".
And, also, if you like driving, and sometimes drive for fun, curves are way more fun than freeways. None of this has anything to do with supercars, either. My boring mom-car has more than enough power to merge safely. It's (surprisingly, to most people) faster (acceleration and top-speed) and (impressively - ICE tech advanced so much) more fuel-efficient than my almost thirty year old Miata. But, obviously, I enjoy the latter 1000x more than the former.
I guess this makes me a car geek. <shrug> That's fine. I do enjoy driving my super-basic, entry-level sportscar. I have less than zero interest in supercars.
A 911, even something like a GTS or Turbo, is peasant-class compared to that.
Where are there local artisans selling leather purses they made for $200? Are you sure you don't mean $4,000? Surely if you are buying a $200 hand made purse, it was made by hand in a low labor cost country and relabeled.
Like the other poster, I also have a couple of their wallets. They’re simple but obviously high quality. They don’t feel as slick as the Coach wallet I was given as a gift, but I have no doubt they will hold up longer.
I do like leather wallets though I almost exclusively use small front pocket ones these days because of sciatica and minimal needs for carrying either cash or a lot of cards.
I carry a travel folder when I travel but my actual wallet is pretty minimalist. (Though just a phone wallet/pocket doesn't work for me. The Apple magnetic wallet I bought which I was also uncomfortable with depending on was 3 cards--no more, no less.
Plan on adding to the collection over time.
He isn't local to me, but I've met him and watched him stitch his bags together and chatted about his style (minimalist, sleek). I couldn't afford anything from him at the time (his smaller items were sold out), but kept his card handy. I'll provide a link, in case anyone is interested.
http://www.foerster-taschen.de/
In general though I agree with your point that it's possible to get the same quality as a luxury brand for cheaper, and luxury brands are about signalling, but it's a continuum. There are also plenty of "luxury" bag brands in the $200-500 range that use crummy leather and you'd be way better off with Coach (or a local artisan like you mentioned.)
Sine qua non is Latin.
To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder. Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever! Who could forget the Rolls Royce Silver Mist? Mist in German means dung, manure or shit. Someone thankfully noticed before it was released (Frankfurt motor show) and it became the Silver Shadow. Then there was "Consignia" ...
When I lived in Hong Kong, I once saw a boutique grocery store that had a wooden hanging-sign/plaque, and IIRC it was 1997 and the sign said "Since 1996."
Far more amusing were the businesses non-ironically translated as things like "1000 Golden Fortune"-something-or-other.
There's quite a lot of history involved too so that I suspect there are routine translations between the various Chinese languages eg Cantonese and Mandarin to English which might be a bit behind the times but they still work despite sounding a bit twee nowadays to the relevant ears.
I say: "viva la difference".
Here in France, the daftest I've seen is the Audi e-tron, with etron meaning turd... Though it's been out of common use, so Audi just left the name as is.
They later changed the name profusely apologizing to Italian users.
The brand actually existed.
Sadly this rings too true, rather closer to home. I own a smart new EV - an MG4. MG is a long standing British Marque. I know my car is largely Chinese.
I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK which is where the Morris Garage originated. My dad drove an MG Midgit in the '60s. My mum owned a Morris 1000 (Moggie). My granddad (Morris Oxford) ... well you get the idea.
In the end you have to decide for yourself exactly what you get when you buy a brand or even what a brand means in the first place.
I quite like my car but I do "firewall" it somewhat - I'm an IT consultant by trade.
Premium is the word that means paying extra for an increase in quality. Consider a Toyota vs a Kia.
These things are often correlated but don’t have to be.
Okay, if we want to limit ourselves to economics jargon rather than vernacular.
>Practically this means luxury goods are purchased to convey status
No, practically it means poor people aren't buying them much. Only some luxury good purchasing is related to status signaling.
>Premium is the word that means paying extra for an increase in quality
I'm not aware of a context where that would be the standard definition, though in some contexts it may be the excess portion of the price.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/difference-between-premium-lu...
https://medium.com/swlh/dont-confuse-luxury-with-premium-8-k...
https://imgmodelsblog.com/luxury-and-premium-comparison
Or, if you want to listen to techies talk about it, listen to this episode of Acquired: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/lvmh
they seem to be slightly better made, but for SO MUCH more money. They have huge stores devoted to their products. Are people really spending money, and that much, on coolers?
replace your entire question with Apple and you'll see the answer as a pattern.
Since then almost every other couch we got was from ikea, since if it ended up sucking at least we didn’t pay 2-3x the cost for it. Which is sad really, I want a nice couch. I just don’t that paying 10-20x the cost wind just be a piece of junk.
Here's a quick overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0nPPc2-jpE
It's almost like a "How to shop for nice stuff at IKEA 101" and covers:
At least with most IKEA products you assemble them yourself, so the level of quality is immediately apparent, and the pricing reflects it. I appreciate that straightforward approach.
Most everything I've bought there has outlasted my desire to keep using it. There are the occasional problems, like a blue table where the veneer shows a bright white mark wherever it gets nicked, but I feel like many criticisms are unfounded and often come across as elitist.
Installing new is pretty cheap and easy - $10 roll and a staple gun. Or just leave it off
Id never buy one again from them though after having everything else fail on us.
About 3 years ago after moving into a new house, I needed a new couch and wanted something that would wear reasonably well without getting into the higher end ($3k+). I found one on Apt2B which they were touting was built around an robotically-welded steel frame, lending to consistent durability. After reading many sofa reviews mentioning buckling particleboard, that sounded pretty good. There weren’t a ton of options due to pandemic shortages so I went for it, which cost me $1500.
It’s held up well so far. Cushions are showing some wear but nothing out of the ordinary, and the steel frame is indeed solid. It might even be worth reulphostering at some point down the road.
Let’s be real too: nobody’s going underneath the sofas at Crate and Barrel to see how they’re constructed. It doesn’t really matter that you can see and touch them.
I don’t even think the luxury brands are much better (e.g., RH). They’ll give you some solid woods and finer materials where you can see them. They are better but not by the amount I would like.
The cheapness isn’t something these manufacturers need to do, it’s just in their interest. Higher margins, more repeat purchases.
It’s not like salaries are high in big furniture production countries like Vietnam. They could do things in a more labor intense way and still make a profit. It’s just that they’ll make more money by making the construction cheap, and making a product that lasts decades is a good way to restrict future business.
I also don't really know what to look for. Most people don't.
In the past you could more or less rely on the store being somewhat reliable and somewhat trustworthy. I say "somewhat" because of course you wouldn't fully trust a salesman, but by and large: you could more or less trust that something was "quality" if it was advertised as such, and/or more expensive and the cheaper options, usually. You didn't need to have a Ph.D. in sofa construction to buy a decent sofa.
Now it's best to assume everything is a lie. Everyone is lying to your face, or just don't know what the they're talking about. Even expensive items marketed as "quality" cannot be relied on being quality at all.
Once upon a time a sofa was a product sold on the market because some people needed sofas, and some people and/or companies knew how to make them. "A fair product for a fair market-conform price". Classic capitalism and free-market economics where everyone wins.
But now it no longer matters if people need sofas, or whether anyone actually gets anything remote to a "fair deal", or any externalities like climate change, or if kids in Vietnam are being exploited. Burn the world, as long as I can sell my crummy sofa, because "free market allows it" is the only logical and moral argument that exists for some people. A sofa is no longer a product; it's just the means to making a profit. There's a subtle difference between to two.
All of this is part of "the financialisation of everything" and "toxic capitalism" that's been going on since the 80s.
That is classic capitalism. Econ 101 notions of efficient free markets rely on all participants being perfect rational actors with perfect information. Snake oil salesmen have always relied on the fact that those assumptions are inaccurate.
This isn't exactly a novel problem.
Higher-end sofas would have logically cost much more...
Parents bought a living room set, it was double what a similar set would be at the local furniture superstore, but the fabric/cushions were a new level of terrible. Basically fell apart in two years.
It's a great place to find wooden tables, beds, dressers, but it's all heavy (as you'd expect) and hard to move.
If I was buying a sofa today I would get something from Stressless.
From their point of view, the modern society may be needlessly infantilizing people who are halfway to adulthood.
We even treat university students like kids, hence all the obsession with micromanaging their campus experience.
We used to think kids were like little adults, then we learned a bit about how the brain develops and how wildly wrong that mental model was.
I’ve met plenty of wickedly level-headed 15 year olds and a whole lot of irresponsible 30 year olds.
The variation is such to an extreme level too.
But I was able to make some money by fixing computers or translating stuff from English to Czech anyway. There was no exploitation in those labor relations just because I was young.
I am not manually skilled, but I can definitely see someone at 15 making a nice chair or a table instead.
I don't think that 15 y.o.s should be treated as fully adult, some limitations on their work are perfectly OK (no ardous work, no work underground etc.). But barring them from working altogether will probably slow their development down. Not everything can be learnt from books or models, some real-world practice, including the most basic elements of interaction with customers/employers, is necessary.
While teenagers are not fully adult in some ways, they are also very different from a 12 year old.
Until recently you could work once you left school. Now you cannot do a full time job until you are 18, but can become an apprentice (so you get some training as well as working). There is nothing to stop you doing nothing.
The requirement to not work until you are 18 has not been particularly beneficial. Brought to you (IIRC) by the same government that massively expanded the higher education system (a huge increase in the proportion of people going to university) for no real benefit.
This is inaccurate. Their schooling is complete after grade 8.
There is no uniform standard of education in the US. Kids in the South are being taught that evolution is on par with intelligent design. Poor black kids in Baltimore have on average a 3rd grade reading level in high school, while rich kids a few counties away are taught when to use a backdoor roth ira. Don't even mention "no child left behind".
Maybe let's calm down a bit with the judgement.
In particular, it's comfortable, well built, but not bulky. I can take it apart move it in my regular sized SUV if needed. I move a lot, and eventually grew tired of bulky things that were difficult or impossible to move without professional help.
I also tried a Burrow sofa which has the same modular properties, but it was not comfortable at all and I had to return it
Also, never pay full price. They offer 25-35% off many times per year, usually around holidays.
EDIT: Actually, in general I've found that my IKEA furniture has done pretty well (basically everything in the house is IKEA) with the sole exception of a "Lack" coffee table, whose surface is kinda disintegrating after 8 years (I think it's basically made of cardboard with a veneer...). The name should perhaps have been a warning.
I don't think "cheap" construction is necessarily a bad thing, honestly. There's ways to do cheap construction such that it works just fine.
So while the materials are cheap and the style not high end, from what I've seen they maximize the engineering to make it durable.
I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
It's probably a signaling thing too...
That said, I am one of those people who doesn't get a lot from them so I can speak to some of criticism. Part of it is just the aesthetic, and theirs doesn't match how I decorate my own space or what I usually feel good around. That's just the nature of aesthetics, though, and there's always going to be some difference in taste between any two people and any two regions.
As for quality, though, I think the critique you hear reflects the quality of their budget products. If you're eyeing modern or euro designs at a fancy furniture studio and then go to IKEA to find a cheap approximation, you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
That shouldn't rally be a surprise (cheap is cheap for a reason) and doesn't hold true for their mid-range and higher products. And heck, it's not even really fair when Walmart and Target furniture isn't any better, but it's enough to keep feeding the reputation.
On the other hand, I bought a dresser with a lot of particle board and, no, it's by no means well made. But it's in a bedroom and it works. I could have spent 4x (or more) for a nicely made hardwood dresser from a good New England brand. But even getting it into the bedroom upstairs might have been a bit of an adventure.
I have IKEA furniture that's lasted for decades. It's value-optimized, but it's usually well designed; if you put it together properly, it will last.
This chair for example is way stronger than it has any right to be. I’ve seen it used in a ton of cafes so it clearly holds up to heavy usage https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/taernoe-chair-outdoor-foldable-...
The look and price feels like it should be a flimsy piece of junk but in reality it’s incredibly solid.
Much stronger, easier to remove and you can remove them without damaging the part like the back of PAX
I'm not going to argue too much with this, but I think this is underselling Ikea quite a bit.
Their cheap stuff is definitely made out of cheap materials. But I've found it to be well-engineered compared to walmart with reinforcements in critical places and general overall good quality control (doesn't come pre-scratched).
Walmart-level furniture on the other hand is often designed to look a certain way, with no consideration for how loads will be placed on it or long-term durability.
Some of the simple desks the sell are nothing more than a tabletop and four screw in legs. With no bracing the desk is unpleasantly wobbly.
The very popular Ikea cube bookcases (https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/kallax-shelving-units-58285/) aren't sold with a backing sheet - thankfully they seem stiff enough without it.
Price is sometimes an indicator (I bought two Ikea dressers ~15 years ago; I kept the cheaper one for only a few years while the more expensive one is still going strong) but not always (my 18-year-old sofa was the entry-level option at the time).
Yes I hate them.
You'd spend $60 on a book case and spend the next 4 hours trying to understand what the instructions mean and how to build it. You also needed a partner to hold corners together.
Now today, the furniture instructions are better and instead 16 different weird fastener, there are 8.
Its a frustration thing. Ikea didn't really do anything but be low cost. We blame Ikea like we blame Walmart for having drug addicts.
They have a lot in common with old LEGO set instructions. Maybe people who hate them didn’t do a bunch of that as a child?
Instructions or no instructions, there’s only so many ways you can put a bunch of planks together.
They may know X should go into Y but the task is so unfamiliar or counter to how they think that they hit their working memory limit before it makes sense to them.
Impatience just makes that worse.
IKEA’s instructions are extremely helpful in this case.
Which is actually part of Ikea's brand identity. When you put it together yourself, you feel closer to the furniture than if someone just plonked it at your house. OTOH, if you hate that kind of thing, you'll never go back, but I guess they have an assembly service these days.
But depreciation on IKEA is huge because while it can last a long time within a household, it moves very poorly so if it has been moved or reassembled once or twice, it’s likely near end of life. But hard to evaluate that, it’s not like it has an odometer — hence value for used it very low.
Ikea's goods usually come in different price ranges with the most expensive often not being 'cheap' but 'cheap given the quality'. That being said, often their cheapest stuff is the best value for money because it's so cheap that it lasting more than a year would be a miracle (but they usually do!).
Well, an electric motor
With the exception of the aforementioned table (which I think cost about 8 euro at the time, so, really, what did I expect) I’ve found all their stuff to be of very decent quality, certainly better than what you could get from ‘traditional’ furniture stores at the same price.
I grew up in a nearly all Ikea household, and it’s only later in life I have discovered their reputation.
Am I missing something?
IKEA is actually awesome for this scenario.
I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.
Also the style does get really old pretty fast for me.
I think good second hand furniture is where it's at: you get to not buy yet another new thing and get something solid and good.
They have a line of pine furniture I like, as well as other things that are solid for the price (their kitchen cabinets) but you only have one chance to make a first impression as they say.
I had an engineered wood bed frame from them split in half, whereas an older IKEA pine (not hardwood but whatever) bed frame still lives on.
It's not as well made as quality pieces, but I worked from the assumption that any couch I bought would be trash. Some of the nice things about a buying into a system like the Finnala are that when an arm, cushion, cover, or whatever fails, I can just replace that piece; there are aftermarket covers and legs; if I move it can be disassembled; and if a new place is smaller, the whole thing doesn't have to be trashed.
I love quality furniture, but it doesn't always fit the bill for a society where people can't afford a single family house or put down roots. (Note: that still doesn't necessarily justify all the items being sold today that are destined for a landfill in a few years.)
Every time I've moved, I think this will be the time I replace it, but the joinery has stayed rock-solid, the wood has aged beautifully (though I admit this is likely owing to a lack of pets or children) and even the upholstery has never pilled or visibly worn (though I keep thinking about ordering a replacement slipcover set from Comfort Works, which makes aftermarket upgrades for long-since-discontinued Ikea products). And the minimalist, Danish-influenced style somehow never looks out of place no matter what else I put around it.
This article has me thinking I may yet keep the Lillberg for years to come.
[0] https://blog.prusa3d.com/mmu2s-printer-enclosure_30215/
Okay those cheap ones make sense, but for coffee table it is robbery...
https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack
Though I'm also going to point out that a LACK side table ($13 now) for 8 years is a rather good deal.
The internals are revealed on the Ikea page too: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-black-brown-801...
I still own some Billies made in 1995 or so by Ikea. Literally massive wood and damn good book shelves. The ones bought by me in 2008 or so very noticeably less well build but still ok. The ones we bought in 2018 or so are shit, especially the shelves are so thin that they begin to sag.
In 2008 or so a friend of mine bought a "kallax" (another name then) and it was awesome, it's still in his basement and looks good. We bought one in 2023 and it's basically only paint, some "wood" and air. It's ok to store stuff in, but it's impossible to drill a screw into the wood. It's like trying to screw paper.
You can drill the thin wood in IKEA furniture like this, but you have to reinforce it.
IKEA has always had a mix of wobbly instacrap and solid stuff. I remember they made a short-lived modular shelf called BRODER [1], which was solid steel and came in wall-mounted or freestanding configurations, the kind of solid thing you want in a garage or storage space. I was shocked at how high-end it was. It was discontinued to cost and low sales.
[1] https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3209/3641557199_eb0860e9eb.jpg
Funnily, the most sturdy piece of furniture we own is from Ikea. Two massive desks build from solid steel frames and a plate made with wood furnishing. Totally indestructible, weighs a ton and was made by Ikea in the 99s or so. Funnily enough, we didn't even know that they where from Ikea. We inherited them from my father in law and were cursing their weight like "man I wish Ikea made this, than it would be easier to carry". After dismantling them for transport we discovered various Ikea stickers. Sadly we don't know the model, just that they where manufactured by Ikea.
The most endurable piece of furniture I know of is the kitchen of my mother in law. Made in the 70s or so it uses resopal finishing and the counters itself looks like new, despite years of heavy use and non stop smoking.
Honestly those cubes at least the 4x4 are perfectly fine. And cardboard is a hell of a lot more sustainable than solid wood and probably particle board
I had to cinched a band of webbing around the outside of the shelf during move to prevent it from falling apart. Gluing all the dowels/joints/connection also helps with strength a lot, but who has time for that.
IMO, it's one of their most brilliantly engineered pieces of furniture. Sure, it's engineered to be cheap - but definitely not cheaply engineered. The whole geometry etc. is designed around what is possible with the materials.
They are really low-priced, versatile, easy to move, and TBH, for veneered cardboard it has no right to still be this sturdy, especially the 2x4 and smaller variants - and as another poster has said, even the large ones, as long as you don't try to move them around with heavy stuff inside. Just be dilligent when assembling and see that the screws are tightened really well.
My coffee table is still from IKEA, but it’s metal. I’ve had it for 11 years now. It’s on wheels and some of them look like they’ve seen some stress over the years… and it’s been moved to 8 homes in those 11 years, which could have been the cause. But it still works great and I don’t know the the average person visiting my home would notice that.
I have been thinking of getting something a little larger and more grown up, but I love the functionality of the wheels, how it can get out of the way, and that I don’t have to baby it. It doesn’t look like they sell it anymore, but it was $40 well spent.
Also… I haven’t priced out Lack tables in a while but it looks like they’re still only $20?! I last bought one in probably 2006 and they were $20CAD at the time.
At some point in my twenties, I decided it was time to upgrade from my broke college student IKEA lifestyle which to me meant West Elm. Every thing I got from West Elm was absolute garbage and none of it lasted more than a handful of years.
Now I'm in the prime of my career and could move up to something actually nice if I really wanted to, like Design Within Reach (truly the most ironic business name in existence). But it's just so hard for me to justify a 5x or more price jump, when, honestly, the IKEA furniture I have has been so good.
I have a decade-old IKEA couch that is still in great shape despite surviving cats, dogs, young children, a snoring spouse who slept on it every night for about a year, and being mostly occupied throughout the entire pandemic. It's a tank, and still looks good to me.
I think I've committed myself to having a style that is basically "IKEA + some vintage stuff" which seems to work well quality wise and is about an order of magnitude cheaper than getting new quality non-IKEA furniture.
IKEA has also however gone downhill compared to ~10 years ago, however. A Poang today, compared to 10 years ago: does not have beveled edges on the wood (which makes it look cheaper and feel less 'soft'), and is even slightly narrower, so that the old cushions dont really fit in the new one.
I think we are seing the effect of increasing prices and breakdown of global supply chains there
You need 2.5 density foam or higher, or you need a "uncushioned" style couch.
(A little tip - the density you want for proper comfort varies by the thickness of the cushion, the weight of the intended users, and the whether it's the seat bottom or the back. The back needing a softer foam.)
Pictures look good but it always disappoints. It’s the one online furniture store I will never buy from again.
A couple of months ago, we stayed in a newer Holiday Inn Express. The bed and cabinets were very nice and well built.
For example:
https://www.charterfurniture.com/products/hospitality/desk-t...
https://www.taisenfurniture.com/ihg-hotel-bedroom-set/
I've purchased couches from West Elm, Restoration Hardware, and a few other well-known places, and they've all been disappointing. From now on I'll stick to Furnitureland and IKEA, but I don't know if I have the energy to go couch shopping at Furnitureland.
So it's actually kind of a two sided loss in quality: the designs are flimsier even while the engineering requirements have become more demanding.
I can’t read the site due to a massive “We value your privacy” pop up informing me about the 1532 data-harvesting “partners” they sell information to, and there’s only “Allow All” button accessible (which is illegal by GDPR).
They really value my privacy, for its resale value.
Thus, people get foam, OSB, and cardboard in a fake canvas bag.
Good upholsterers are hard to find, often eccentrics, and usually will not tolerate cheapskates. If you own something pricey like a boat or restaurant, than most are happy to get something that will last. Even a few yards of period correct fabrics or leather is more expensive than the typical Ikea living room set.
One needs to learn these things if you want to stay married. lol =)
It seems like the frame in the back has some sort of support that is made out of a material that is closer to cardboard than wood. When our kids run into it, the back of the chair deforms a bit and has to be bent back. I have no idea why the frame of a chair would be made out of something so weak. I expect we'll have to replace them in 5 years or so, and we'll aim for something more old-school.
Seems like Sofas are last to make the economical steel channel furniture jump, you can get tons of sturdy/durable bedframes for like $100 shipped on Amazon. Most cheap metal futon frames also last forever if it wasn't for the moving mechanical components. I'd like to see more steel + bolt sofas.
I used to have some expensive, but ultimately crap, book cases. Book cases are not designed by people who own a lot of books. 36" to 48" spans of fast growth pine will stretch and bow within a year or two. I designed my own book case. I went to a furniture making store. We went back and forth a few times. The biggest sticking point that took four attempts for the furniture maker to understand was where to put the fixed shelf. It does not go in the middle because that wastes space. We made it out of pine. 7' 8" tall, so that when standing it up, it will clear an 8ft ceiling in modern American homes. 22" wide shelves so they cannot flex. Fixed shelf to counteract gravity. Made specifically to carry paperback novels and similarly sized books. "Sand it three times, prime it, sand it, prime it, sand it, paint it, sand it, paint it, no I don't care that a single book case will cost $200." I bought 24 of them. Many hundreds of lineal feet of book cases. We still have them 24 years later and they are as good as new. And the paint job, because it is two layers of prime and two layers of paint, on a mirror surface, looks like you just took the item from the showroom floor.
I have a plywood bookcase I made to store cooking books. The cheapest plywood you can imagine from the big box store. But because of the structural design, 15 years later it still holds up without any bowing or flexing.
Modern furniture is absolute junk. Even the "good stuff."
The issue is that most modern households in the U.S. can not hack that kind of pricetag for a sofa / couch. Hell, I could never spend that kind of jack on a couch, even if I literally saved up for it (which would take years)... it is just far too much of a percentage of my income for one furniture item.
So, how do we solve that issue (e.g. its good, but if it is 10% of your gross annual income, how could you afford it)? Either people need to get paid more, or ???
> Eighteenth-century furniture was expensive. At a time when a journeyman joiner earned three livres a day, a good-quality armchair might cost as much as a hundred livres.
And for that you CAN get good furniture; the trick is figuring out you're paying for the quality and not just overpaying for junk.
No matter how much money I make, I like to think there's price-tags I'd still balk at just because I don't want to be a sucker. Or get involved in status-signaling.. not sure which is worse.
So I started thinking about comparisons also. I like to go back to cups of coffee, and you could spend 6 bucks on coffee easily.. is a piece of furniture worth a thousand cups? Maybe. On the other hand, you could own like 3 cargo containers for this cash (think of the material involved), or a used car (think of the utility!).
So nah, this feels like way too much money, unless it's a mint condition antique that some king and queen used to sit on. A huge Belffin modular super sofa with 9 seats and 2 ottomans is less than $2k.
I pay, very rarely, for good coffee outside of the home. I prefer the coffee I make at home. It costs me around 8c per cup, 12c if I steam some milk. Some really good beans that cost around $25 a pound. Admittedly the coffee is made on a Jura X8, or a WEGA espresso machine at the RV.
Nobody really comes in our house, so we're not status signalling to anyone other than this casual mention on social media about some stuff. Money is a tool, and deployed properly, can bring a lot of leverage to problems.
You're free to make a judgement, and would probably blow a gasket knowing what I dropped on three office chairs, but at the end of the day, I used the tools I have at my disposal.
The old clay pipes used to be the best for those, look much better than cinder blocks, but whatever.
Did anyone else find this weird / funny?
Like, just off the top of my head I'd put my bed at the top of my list, waaaay ahead of a sofa. Next might be the desk & chair I WFH at, and then it goes on from there.
I get that the article wants to build engagement by "raising the stakes", but c'mon. Sofas are not that important :)