IKEA brings out the Swede in me

I love IKEA. Their products are precisely engineered for function, with no waste of materials or space. If you've ever purchased furniture there, you know that it's the assembling of the furniture that is the challenge. I've put a few IKEA shelves and cabinets together, "reading" the wordless instructions, and simply YEARNING for written language. Once I came very close to sawing a board of my IKEA butcher block cart in half because I didn't believe the pictogram instructions. Another time I learned that in our three-dimensional world, shelves can be flipped in TWO different ways. Unfortunately, I didn't learn that until we were finished with the first bookcase. The lesson is this: you can have faith that your furniture will come out right if you do exactly what the little people in the instructions show you.

The IKEA building itself is a work of engineering, with winding one-way passages that lead you past every product and showroom. I went the wrong way once. It just felt wrong. While you're on this path, you can mark down the aisle and bin numbers where you can find your item in the basement warehouse, a place that rivals the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And you've got to love the names of their products. I have put together four billys (bookcases), I'm sitting in an upholstered ektorp (chair), there are two pair of alvine spets (lace curtains) on my windows, and we are about to buy two hemnes (chest of drawers).

You might wonder how this giant Swedish furniture retailer got its start. Well, it all began in 1943 with a 17-year-old Swedish boy named Ingvar Kemprad from a farm called Elmtaryd in the town of Agunnaryd. And if you gather all those underlined capital letters, you get the acronym IKEA. Today, a complicated mesh of corporations control IKEA. The original Ingvar family has maintained a large stake as well. Details are a little sketchy, but we are funneling a lot of money to Switzerland apparently. There are one or two scandals in the company's history, but nothing that can't be illuminated by a husvig (ceiling-mounted spotlight) or covered up with an eivor (blanket).

My mother was 100% Swedish. That, and the well-designed products that I can find in my neighborhood IKEA make me proud to be a Swede.