Ikea builds an entire freaking neighborhood

Ikea is a Swedish furniture and interior design company some of you may know. They create affordable, relatively stylish items for the trendii postmodern home...a kind of Gap for furniture, I guess.

Something about this company always rubbed me the wrong way. It's too packaged and slick for my tastes. Your home should be an extension of yourself, reflecting something of who you are as an individual. Ikea seems so blandly moddish: "Here, you don't have to think too hard to be a vaguely-inoffensive lightweight hipster. We've done all the planning so you don't have to." It's just one more way to outsource your individuality to some big corporation, buying your "good taste" all in one lump. I just wish people would think for themselves and be a little more creative with their aesthetic choices, I guess.

Now they are moving beyond furniture and designing an entire neighborhood.

Call me cranky and irritable, but there is something just not right about living your whole life, top to bottom, within the design confines delineated by a single company. Everything is planned out and all choices are already made. House by Ikea. Sofa by Ikea. Curtains by Ikea. Kitchen by Ikea. Garage by Ikea. Neighbor’s house by Ikea. Street layout by Ikea. See how that works? Who provides the psych meds people are going to need after living here for a few years? IkeaPharm? True, the houses won't come pre-stocked with Ikea furnature (or any other type) so you are still free to make your choices inside, I guess. But I dunno. I just. Don't. Know.

The Swedish furniture company will begin focusing on more than just home interiors as it designs and builds a residential area outside of London

Ikea is truly expanding its horizons with its next project. Instead of designing bookcases and chairs, the Swedish furniture company is making a whole neighborhood. Its property-developing unit, LandProp, has purchased 27 acres of unused industrial land outside London, on which it plans to develop a residential area, dubbed Strand East, for some 6,000 people. Here, a guide to the company's latest attempt to Ikea-ize your life:

Why is Ikea doing this?

The company says it wants to bring its unique sense of design to urban planning, in a way that provides affordable housing to the city's citizens, with a focus on families. The project "promises [a] sort of pleasant population density”…

Source:
news.yahoo.com...

On one hand I agree with your concern about the corporate monopoly on housing Ikea appears to be striving for but on the other it`s really only a natural product mix/revenue stream evolution from their furniture in others homes to their furniture in their homes..only logical business sense on their part. To add to your post, they did have some good social intentions with their business plan for this neighborhood project as the idea in part, came about in trying to address the London housing crisis. Although this is now hitting the mainstream media, they have been working on this type of development since 1996 in Sweden. Starting price for the London project appears to be in the $260,000.

Here's the actually site for the houses themselves;

www.boklok.com...

Here's an article from Ecofriend;

www.ecofriend.com...

They have also played around with using shipping containers as homes too;

www.netdesignshow.com...

sustainablehouses.net...


Side note; if anyone wants to discuss shipping container architecture (it's something I've been fascinated with for a number of years), feel free to U2U me

reply to post by Ericthenewbie


Thanks for your input and links.

I have no problem with them doing this from a business perspective, of course it makes sense on that level. I just dislike it aesthetically and I think it impoverishes people's souls to some extent when they "outsource" so much of their asethetic choice to a single source - any source. The trend towards homoginization of design and mass production is also distasteful to me.