By Jess Jones MA Material and Visual Culture, 2022-23 It is important to appreciate that IKEA are constructing consumers imagined lives through encouraging their engagement with the environment around them
By
Jess Jones
MA Material and Visual Culture, 2022-23
It may or may not be a surprise that this kitchen is not in someone’s home but in an IKEA showroom. IKEA stores are located across the world. They are furniture shops where one can purchase relatively inexpensive home furnishings, appliances, and décor. I present the idea of “mimetic-homeyness” to suggest that IKEA showrooms function as prescribed emulations of the home. I focus on the placement of certain objects within the showrooms to capture how IKEA evokes feelings of mimetic-homeyness, through bringing Grant McCracken (1989) in line with Pauline Garvey (2018) as well as my own ethnographic findings walking through IKEA stores. This is to examine how the spatial aspects of the showrooms are imbued with sensorial detail using theory from Sarah Pink (2004). Ultimately, as much as people make buildings, the buildings themselves mediate the way that people interact with them through attention to sensorial detail.
‘Homeyness’
‘Homeyness’ is a term coined by Grant McCracken (1989), who gathered ethnographic data from Southern Ontario homeowners to examine how North Americans create their home environments. ‘Homeyness’ works as an expression of someone living in a certain space, where people’s homes projected feelings of comfort and cosiness.
I use pieces of Garvey’s ethnography on IKEA showrooms in Stockholm and Dublin (2018) in line with my own findings to show that by adding depth to domesticity, the showrooms feel more “lived-in”. Garvey described that “deliberately placed items of personalia indicate family members in showrooms such as knitting needles and wool on a shelf” or “a breakfast tray on a bed suggests a recently departed resident” (2018: 27). These objects work to evoke feelings of lived experience because it implies that the showrooms are a snapshot of in-the-moment-living. In this instance, Garvey’s ethnography is helpful in highlighting that IKEA’s attention to detail works to create the atmosphere of the home through using everyday objects that are seemingly in action.
I recently visited the Hammersmith IKEA as part of my wider research and was acutely aware of the placement of certain objects. The kitchen showrooms within this IKEA store were dressed with multiple pots, pans, and decorations. When I opened a fridge, I found that it contained many “foods”, such as pictures of blueberries and green vegetables in reusable containers. In the door of a particular fridge was a Styrofoam lemon, apple, and bunch of grapes. Upon closer inspection, I realised that someone had actually tried to eat an apple, leaving teeth marks punctured into its plastic flesh.
Figure 2. Photograph by the author.The vandalising of the apple shows that people’s expectation of homeyness is shaping IKEA, in that it breaks the fantasy because the apple is not real, and thus people are shaping the showroom. Yet on the other hand, there is no indication as to how long this apple has been in this state, or if IKEA would replace it. In this way, IKEA can only be an emulation of the home because crucially, it is not lived in even with people attempting to treat it like a home, to the degree of biting into plastic apples.
Similarly, on a shelf in one of the showroom living rooms were four photos depicting the family that “lived” there. I draw parallels between these photos in connection with a photo from an article by Drazin and Frohlich about photograph framing (2007), who suggest that framed photos “denote blood-relatedness as it is noticeable that such images are almost exclusively of family and affines” (2007: 62). There are clear similarities between both images, as they both offer expectations of the modern nuclear family. The authors further elaborate that sometimes, “a frame fits in with the décor of the room so that it makes the photograph physically a part of the house” (2007: 62-63).
Figure 3. Photograph by the author.
Figure 4. Photograph from Drazin and Frolich (2007).
I use the ethnographic examples I have analysed to examine how IKEA produces ideas of mimetic-homeyness. Traditional markers of homeyness included details such as plants, flowers, an arrangement of books, or photographs to seem “as though someone lived there” (McCracken 1989: 170). Likewise, the IKEA showrooms I visited were trying to present the showrooms as lived-in through creating a comfortable atmosphere, depicting family life. This was achieved through the placement of personal items, which evoked a sense of informal normality encouraging customers entering the showrooms to view these products as fixtures of “people’s” lives. In this way, the mediation of the objects within the showroom affects the consumer. Yet, the showroom only evokes mimetic-homeyness because IKEA are only using objects to mark family life. The knitting needles, Styrofoam fruit, and framed stock images1 all lack the depth and historical attachment to a real person or family. As such, instead of recreating and imitating homes, IKEA are prefiguring and reproducing what homes can be through inviting us to imagine what the décor could look like in a real home. The showrooms affect people through mediating our interactions through the mimesis of dwelling, because although it may look like someone lives there, we know this is not the case.
So, what are these homes designed to make us feel? These objects in the showrooms allow people to think speculatively about their homes because they have the possibility to engage with the potential of what their home could be. This is facilitated by what is available in the showrooms, right down to how fruit would look or fit in the fridge. There is a symbiotic relationship between IKEA consumers affecting the building, such as engaging with the details in the showrooms, to the extent that some people try to eat the display. But ultimately, I have shown that IKEA showrooms, by depicting what ‘homes’ should look like, set the terms for an individual imagining their domestic living environment; therefore, substantiating that IKEA showrooms mediate people’s ideas of home as much, if not more, than people’s own ideas and experiences of their own homes.
A spatial understanding of IKEA showrooms
Together, let’s think more broadly about how the designed space and sensorial aspects of IKEA allow for people to consider their own home design and creative imagination when participating in showrooms, rather than just focusing on specific objects. Garvey suggested that the showrooms worked as ‘tableaux vivant’, a living picture whereby the energy and movement of people within the showrooms created a lived domestic atmosphere (2018: 27). The housing theatre was “animated with actual householders as both the subjects and the objects of the shopping experience” (2018: 46). Each IKEA showroom worked as a stage, with designed sets and consumers as actors. Or put differently, it worked as living art because through immersion, people could think about their own homes in the showrooms. To understand the shopping experience of customers, one needs to appreciate that aspects of showrooms each have features that are potentially more or less suited to what the customer is searching for or gaining inspiration from.
It is important to appreciate that IKEA are constructing consumers imagined lives through encouraging their engagement with the environment around them. “Sitting on beds and sofas or at tables is not only permitted by IKEA management but is positively encouraged” (Garvey, 2018: 41), Thus, the showrooms became “peopled in the aggregate of householders milling about, touching, testing and comparing” (2018: 43). Customers can engage with the space around them, and thus shorten the temporal distance between themselves and the showroom as they question “can I see myself using this?” This is a co-productive relationship between supplier and consumer; a relationship of what is designed and what is to buy.
I bring Sarah Pink (2004) in conversation with Garvey (2018) to better think through how the sensorial aspect of the showrooms work to emulate the home. In her text Home Truths (2004), Pink pays attention to the home as deeply connected to sensory experience. Pink’s informants focused on the different sensorial aspects of their surroundings, “an old chest of drawers might be discussed in terms of its smell, although it could have been described in terms of sound of texture – for example, the jerkiness and squeaky noise” (2004: 62). Similarly, IKEA encourages active immersion, whether this be to listen to the sound cupboards make when they open and close or, as we have already explored, examine the colour, feel, shape, weight but crucially not taste of Styrofoam fruit. In this way, the tactile adventure of IKEA showrooms emulates one’s experience of their home. To insert yourself into the story of the showroom allows you to participate in the sensory experience of an emulated home, and in this way, IKEA produces mimetic-homeyness. The fantasy of what people want their homes to be like is shaped by the extensive sensory possibilities available in the showroom.
As such, IKEA showrooms are important places for creating and designing dwellings. They work as emulations of the home, filled with identity of both consumers and design. Appreciating cross-cultural definitions of a “home” is a wider debate within Material Culture. Although IKEA is often thought of as a commercial conglomerate that mass-produces furniture which stands in opposition to the idea of an individually curated and crafted home, I disagree. IKEA showrooms create spaces which allow consumers to see how certain furnishings, ornaments, and decorations would work in relation to their own experience of dwelling. Immersion within the showrooms is less about the objects in question that fill that space, but rather how there are imagined uses, relations, and fulfilments between what consumers purchase and want to achieve from these objects for their homes.
The tacit experience of walking through the showrooms affects how people interact with the space, allowing customers to relish in the sensorial detail within the store. In this way, IKEA works to affect people, whilst similarly people choose which aspects of IKEA they want to bring into their homes. This emphasises mimetic-homeyness because the showrooms are living pictures, or indeed a performance very similar to the original, just not quite.
Bringing together ideas of mimesis and homeyness is fruitful to encourage anthropological discussions around what constitutes dwelling with regards to consumption practices. I ponder if IKEA’s slogan, “The Wonderful Everyday”, actually reveals the magical mimesis of everyday.
1 I found that the photograph of the two children on the sofa from Figure 3 is part of an IKEA advert for a storage table.
Title Image: An IKEA kitchen showroom. Wikimedia Commons.
Drazin, A. and D. Frohlich (2007) Good Intentions: Remembering through Framing Photographs in English Homes. Ethnos 72(1): 51-76. Garvey, P. (2018) Unpacking Ikea: Swedish Design for the Purchasing Masses. New York: Routledge. McCracken, G. (1989) Homeyness: A Cultural Account of One Constellation of Consumer Goods and Meanings. Interpretive Consumer Research 16(1): 168-183. Pink, S. (2004) Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects, and Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury.