Finding relief in real life

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/08/2016 (3318 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The new 2017 IKEA catalogue is pretty upfront about the way we live now. Its 326 pages offer visual proof that:

● Sometimes we eat dinner sitting on the couch. Sometimes we eat by ourselves, possibly watching Netflix.

● Sometimes the dining-room table is covered not with co-ordinated serving-ware and healthy Scandi-style suppers but with paperwork and school projects.

● Sometimes our kitchen counters and shelves aren’t “curated.” Sometimes they’re just crammed.

● Sometimes our bathroom isn’t a spa-like oasis. Sometimes it’s a tiny rental and we’re stuck with tired tile and a peach-coloured sink.

● Sometimes our bedroom isn’t a luxurious retreat. Sometimes our bedroom is smack in the middle of our living room.

Marking its 40th year in Canada, IKEA acknowledges that people are feeling a lot of pressure about their homes. The Swedish furniture giant is increasingly moving away from the aspirational perfection that once dictated catalogues’ dustless, airless, super-styled layouts.

Forget matchy-matchy furniture and inexplicable bowls of limes. The 2017 catalogue is a frank admission that most of us are doing the best we can with what we’ve got, even if we’re short of money, rushed for time and crunched for space.

So where is this loosey-goosey esthetic coming from?

THE REALLY REAL: Sites like Apartment Therapy have allowed us to peer into the lives of actual people and their actual homes. Those “Colorful and Crafty,” “Eclectic and Energized,” “Cheerful and Quirky” lofts and bungalows and industrial spaces in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Austin, Texas and Montreal have replaced catalogue dreams with lived-in rooms that are messy and mismatched, individualized and sometimes outright awful.

It’s reassuring.

THE REALLY SATIRICAL: The Internet is also handy for satirists, who can be hard on humourless shelter porn. Any company catalogue that takes itself too seriously — whether that involves over-the-top opulence or ruthless minimalism — will be fair game.

The site Catalog Living once chronicled mythical suburbanites “Gary and Elaine,” with their Pottery Barn co-ordinated colourways and bowls of wicker balls and imperative-verb wall decorations (Eat! Love! Laugh!).

For several holiday seasons, Deadspin published “The Hater’s Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalog,” while sites like Suburban Turmoil have mercilessly parodied Restoration Hardware’s thumping great “Source Books,” with their “reclaimed,” salvaged,’ “weathered,” “distressed” and “repurposed” faux-vintage tableaux.

That’s the thing about perfection. It’s just asking to be spoofed.

THE REALLY SERIOUS: That Better Homes and Gardens image of a suburban house with a yard and two children and a golden retriever is now familiar mostly from marathon viewings of Mad Men.

The IKEA catalogue understands there are all sorts of ways to live. There are young urban nomads, often making multiple moves from country to country and job to job. There are couples squeezed into micro-apartments in crowded and overpriced cities. There are people looking for communal-living solutions, and people content to live alone.

The single-family detached dwelling is no longer a norm, or even necessarily an ideal. Homes are different, and families are changing.

THE REALLY SAVVY: Of course, it’s important to recognize that IKEA’s new catalogue is not anti-marketing. It’s just another level of marketing.

Replacing chilly aspirational models with attainable, relatable spaces could be seen as a smart business decision. If anything, it will increase our longing for Malm dressers and Svertan tray tables.

 

The IKEA catalogue, no matter how casual, is still trying to sell us stuff.

But at least it’s not trying to sell us perfection. And that’s a relief.

 

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca