A Visit to Ikea

The Ikea superstore in Red Hook offers a brilliant example of compelling merchandising. On the way to your destination within the store, you pass tableau after tableau of beautifully furnished rooms – dining rooms, living rooms, work rooms, and so forth – rooms that would not look out of place in the glossiest of shelter magazines, rooms that invite you to linger, rooms that whet your appetite for items you didn’t know you wanted. You cannot avoid passing these rooms because there’s only one way to your destination. To reach it, you must follow the store's arrows on its version of the yellow brick road.

Our destination a few days ago was Ikea's kitchen department. We wanted to see the kitchen cabinets that we had chosen for our renovation, cabinets initially chosen from a catalog, to make sure they were suitable. This inspection permitted us to choose the doors (birch veneer with solid beech edges), make a few minor alterations in our plan, and clarify the procedures for ordering and delivery.

Ikea kitchens are beautiful, functional, and inexpensive. Our architect endorsed them, and we’ve heard good reports about them from people we know. So we did not consider pricier, customized cabinets that no doubt would last even longer, because as far as we’re concerned, they don’t have to last terribly long. By now, after all, our life expectancy is not brilliant, unlike that of the majority of our fellow customers, young couples with earnest, unlined faces, justifiably concerned about how long their kitchens, a major purchase, will last.

The kitchen we’re remodeling is the second kitchen that we’ve renovated. The first was our Jerusalem apartment, in which we lived for 32 years. We did virtually no planning of our own for that kitchen but instead relied almost entirely on our architect, who gave us a functional, pleasant, minimalist kitchen. Ironically, we’re spending much more time designing our kitchen in Brooklyn, even though we'll be working in it for nowhere near 32 years.

There are several reasons for our greater attention to detail. First of all, we’re no longer employed, so we have the time to spend on the design. Second, even when inflation is taken into account, the cost is enormously higher now than it was for the Jerusalem kitchen, which was remodeled in 1975. At that time, incomes in Israel were modest, expectations for luxury rare, and inexpensive labor from the occupied territories plentiful. Finally, the choices available for finishes and fittings are far greater now than they were then. Indeed the plethora of choices is almost bewildering. Which of a dozen materials, for example, should we choose for counter tops when each has its own advantages and disadvantages?

We probably raised the average age of the customers visiting the Ikea kitchen department by 20 years. But as we were leaving the store, we saw an elderly couple. The woman, bent with osteoporosis, was pushing her husband along in a wheelchair. From snatches of their conversation that we overheard, it seemed that they were moving from their home of many years to a small apartment in an assisted living facility.

My wife and I hope that we can avoid such a move. No steps are required to enter our building or our apartment, we're remodeling with an eye for future disability, and most important, our daughter, a palliative care social worker, and her family live in the other wing of our building. If we need caretakers, she can supervise them with minimum inconvenience to her. So if we’re lucky, we can remain in our apartment even if someone else must do the cooking. If we're lucky, this renovation will be our last.