Bully For Billy

I just read that the designer of Ikea's Billy Bookcase has died. If you're not familiar with it, it's one of Ikea's most popular and long-running items.  I have two of them. How popular is it?  Well, you could click that link and read it's Wikipedia page.  Or you could just contemplate that it's Ikea furniture with its own Wikipedia page.

Anyway, the designer was Gillis Lundgren, and he actually died several weeks ago.  I don't remember reading about it then, so I assume it just happened to be the same day that Donald Trump said something.  Apparently, Lundgren not only designed Billy, he's also responsible for Ikea's flat-packing. That's right up there with Allen Keys, wordless instructions, and unpronouncable names in defining the Ikea experience, so he was pretty important.

This article I read was in the Toronto Star, so of course they couldn't pay tribute; they had to give him a backhanded putdown on the way to the grave, by quoting a snobby furniture maker criticizing Billy's effect on furniture.  Fortunately, the article did go on to talk about good design, minimalism, etc.  But the article was framed around the idea that Lundgren's contribution has been mixed.

Of course, I've seen this case made before, that Ikea is the McDonald's of furniture, dumbing-down and commodifying a business that was once a focus of the design world.  Sure your Vejmon coffee table is not the height of furniture.  But I have to ask the Ikea haters, where do you think normal people buy furniture?  No, not your urban hipster friends, I mean the majority of people. Generally, the answer is Walmart, Sears, or one of various furniture warehouse chains with TV ads featuring men shouting that you don't have to pay for six years.  Look at it that way and you realize that Ikea is the most design-sophisticated choice.  If they didn't exist, their customers would be buying clichéd old knock-offs of familiar but dull styles.

Really, I wish there were more big-box chains that could get their balance of style and accessibility to the same level as Ikea.  No, I realize I'm never going to go to Best Buy and get a cheap iPad that I assemble myself.  But if I could get Ikea's level of quality and selection in a general department store, I'd never go to Walmart again.  That would be a great contribution to the world, almost as good as encouraging 41 million people to buy bookcases.