News

When he first took a saw to an IKEA Hemnes daybed, Andrew La Fleur just wanted to make a banquette to fit the corner of his small Toronto kitchen.

"I was always a big fan of IKEA, especially the as-is section," says Mr. La Fleur, a real-estate agent whose previous carpentry experience was limited to building a backyard fort when he was a kid. "One day I was in IKEA and I saw a deconstructed pile of wood that was the frame of a daybed. I just had an idea, and I imagined what it could be."

He had no idea he'd stumbled onto a global phenomenon. A few months later, Mr. La Fleur's cozy daybed-turned-banquette was voted "Hack of the Year" by readers of the popular blog IKEAhacker - and he'd joined a legion of do-it-yourselfers devoted to customizing everyone's favourite Swedish furniture.

Showing off their handiwork on blogs, websites and message boards, IKEA hackers have turned wardrobe doors into room dividers, transformed a cutlery stand into a lamp, made a CD rack into a toilet paper holder, and even turned two bookcases into a coffin that's now part of the Art Gallery of Ontario's permanent collection.

For a brand whose main attributes are simplicity and ease of assembly, IKEA seems to inspire a lot of mucking about. Why do people complicate their lives by customizing, when they could just shove a Billy bookcase in the corner and be done with it?

With the cost of real estate rising steadily in most major cities, many turn to hacking because they need to furnish small spaces. IKEA's standard sizes and assemble-it-yourself concept make it easy to experiment, and modifying is much cheaper than ordering something custom-built.

But the urge to hack goes deeper: For some, putting their own stamp on mass-market furniture feels like scoring a victory for creativity over conformity.

"I get a buzz when I finish a hack," says Jules (who asked that her full name not be used, to keep her blog life and real life separate.)

An advertising copywriter in Malaysia, she started the IKEAhacker blog last year to celebrate the best of do-it-yourself ingenuity. "You get exactly what you want. It's a sense of accomplishment. And ... as much as I love IKEA, I don't want to live in a showroom."

Whatever you want to do to a piece of IKEA furniture, chances are she knows someone on the Web who can help you do it.

Jules - whose nickname is a tribute to her favourite IKEA desk chair - has been gratified by the enthusiastic international response to her site. IKEA's odd furniture-naming language, a mishmash of Scandinavian place names and nouns, has become a lingua franca on her blog's forums.

"They may speak French, Italian, Chinese, but we all know what a Billy, Expedit and Fatkum is," Jules says (referring to two bookcases and a kitchen system, respectively). "I mean, Malaysians and Swedes probably have nothing in common except pine furniture in their living rooms."

Jules has done a number of hacks, including a desk pedestal made from a bedside table and combining two smaller cabinets into a two-level bathroom cabinet with a door made from a poster frame.

"There's quite a culture around [hacking]," says Susan Martin, whose IKEAFans.com forum boasts 8,300 members. In fact, Ms. Martin thinks the company attracts "more intrepid do-it-yourselfers than folks who go into Home Depot.

"It's really quite fun to take things and mould them to your own needs," says Ms. Martin, who lives in Richmond, Va.

Unsurprisingly, IKEA loves the attention. "We get pretty excited when people want to interpret our products differently and show [their] versatility," says Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick, spokeswoman for IKEA Canada.

The company's support makes sense: IKEA hackers tend to be loyal customers, and what could be better than dozens of message boards devoted to semi-obsessive study of your product?

Hacking's not just for hobbyists - for some, it's high art. Joe Scanlan remembers walking through a Toronto IKEA store in 1998 searching for something he could transform into an eternal resting place.

"They make a lot of storage furniture you could easily put a body in, but I wasn't interested in that," says Mr. Scanlan, an artist who now resides in New Haven, Conn., and teaches at Yale University. He wanted the instantly identifiable IKEA style, which he found in the popular Billy bookcase. He removed the shelves to create "DIY," a Spartan yet functional coffin, which he says he sold to the AGO in 1999 for about $10,000.

"As far as aesthetics are concerned, there's this kind of sublime beauty to the massiveness of an operation like IKEA, and we can marvel at it," he says. "But there's also something horrible and terrible about it. There's an attraction and a repulsion at the same time."

Mr. Scanlan's feelings toward IKEA may be more complicated than those of most, but he believes the Swedish retailer's cheerful ubiquity inspires a rebellious urge to hack.

"They're so aggressively confident that they know what we all need, and in a lot of people that just naturally causes a counter-response, a 'No, you don't.' "

Allen key not required

This furniture might be too nice to hack - IKEA is going upscale. Well, sort of.

This week the Swedish furniture giant rolled out a new high-end collection in Canada. Called Stockholm, it aims to capture consumers who have "graduated" from their college-dorm Ikea furniture but don't necessarily want to pay $5,000 for a sofa.

"A lot of customers have grown up with IKEA, but their needs have changed," says Ikea designer Paul Ekelschot.

"They are looking for a more mature and permanent fixture, without sacrificing price."

The line ranges from a $1,799 leather sofa to vases for $14.99. The sofa is made of higher-grade leather than IKEA's other offerings, sits on sturdy oak legs and arrives at your house already assembled; the vases feature IKEA's familiar sleek design, but they're handmade.

"To go into the higher level is a proper approach for IKEA," says Stefan Wille, president of Aktrin, a furniture-industry consulting company based in Oakville, Ont. "They are very much concentrated in urban centres, and those are the above-average income areas in Canada."

The collection also includes chairs, tables, bookshelves, rugs and fabrics.