The Road to Agunnaryd

In honour of Buy Nothing Day/Week/Month, a little disclosure about a wee obsession of mine. Not content with having the world's largest collection of hex wrenches and a library of IKEA catalogues dating back to the mid 1970s, I have now embarked upon a mission to visit each of the 227 blue and yellow stores in the chain.

Just because.

San Francisco East Palo Alto

Budapest Budaörs

Paris Roissy

Vienna Vösendorf

Somewhere in Germany...

For those of you who have ever wondered, Margaret Marks has compiled a list of the IKEA naming convention:

Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian placenames
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish placenames
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: men’s names
Materials, curtains: women’s names
Garden furniture: Swedish islands
Carpets: Danish placenames
Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, sailors’ language
Bedlinens, bedcovers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
Kitchen utensils (cutlery, crockers, textiles, glass, porcelain, tablecloths, candles, serviettes, decorative articles, vases etc.): foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish placenames

Apparently there is an IKEA employee whose job it is to come up with new names for items, making sure there isn't a name that means something really awful in another language. This check hasn't always been successful: IKEA once gave a bed a name that means 'good fuck' in German, which, in hindsight, may have been appropriate considering that 10 percent of all living Europeans were conceived in an IKEA bed...