Our curio cabinets and chesterfield sofas are the backdrops of domesticity, forming the unchanging indoor landscape—mahogany mountains, meadows of chintz—against which we go about life. Choosing a piece of furniture was once a serious decision, because of the expectation that it was permanent. It is said that Americans keep sofas longer than they keep cars, and change dining-room tables about as often as they trade spouses. IKEA has made interiors ephemeral. Its furniture is placeholder furniture, the prelude to an always imminent upgrade. It works until it breaks, or until its owners break up. It carries no traces. (Jonathan Coulton’s song “IKEA”: “Just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen / Selling furniture for college kids and divorced men.”) In David Fincher’s 1999 movie, “Fight Club,” the character played by Edward Norton flips through an IKEA catalogue while sitting on the toilet. “Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct,” he says, in a voice-over. “If I saw something clever, like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it.” The ease of self-invention that IKEA enables is liberating, but it can be sad to be able to make a life, or to dispose of it, so cheaply.

Ingvar Kamprad holding an ÖGLA café chair, launched in 1961. Courtesy IKEA Courtesy IKEA

IKEA stores, like Chihuahuas and cilantro, provoke extreme reactions. Some people, such as the members of the “Official IKEA Is Hell on Earth” Facebook group, can’t stand them. Others treat IKEA as a human-size doll house, hanging around its prettily furnished rooms just for entertainment. In recent months, middle-aged singles have taken to congregating in a Shanghai IKEA in such numbers that management has been forced to cordon off a designated “match-making corner.” Shen Jinhua, an IKEA employee, told the Shanghai Daily, “Before we set up an isolated area for them, they occupied the seats in the dining area for a long time, and thus other guests could not find a seat.”

Each IKEA store is carefully laid out to stimulate certain behaviors. Johan Stenebo, who worked at IKEA for twenty years, writes in “The Truth About IKEA” (2009), “One could describe it as if IKEA grabs you by the hand and consciously guides you through the store in order to make you buy as much as possible.” In June, I visited IKEA’s new store in Hyllie, a suburb of the Swedish city of Malmö. The store, which opened in September, 2010, is IKEA’s “everyday best practice” store. Martin Albrecht, the store’s manager, agreed to give me a tour of the premises. “All the knowledge and wisdom of our stores is built into this one,” he said.

A bin of blue-and-yellow tarpaulin bags stood at the store’s entrance. Albrecht explained that a customer, wherever he is, should always be able to see the next bin of bags. We were standing on the gray path that guides customers through an IKEA store. “We call this the Main Aisle,” Albrecht said. “You should feel safe that you can walk it and you won’t miss anything.” The Main Aisle is supposed to curve every fifty feet or so, to keep the customer interested. A path that is straight for any longer than that is called an Autobahn—a big, boring mistake. Those customers who would like to veer off the IKEA-approved route often cannot find the exit. IKEA stores have secret doors, like those in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”: one can step through them and go directly from Living Rooms (which an IKEA store always starts with) to Children’s Rooms (“Cots are our ticket to building a lifelong relationship with our core customers,” according to an internal report) without having to look at two hundred bath mats on the way. But the hidden portals are almost impossible to find: if sticky eyeballs are the metric of success on the Internet, then IKEA rules sticky feet. Alan Penn, a professor of architectural and urban computing at University College London, conducted a study of the IKEA labyrinth and deemed it sadomasochistic. The only comparably vast shopping environment he could think of, he told the London Times, was the Bazaar of Isfahan, a seventeenth-century Persian marketplace.

Albrecht, an affably earnest man in a blue-and-yellow polo shirt, led the way past several room sets. In the IKEA catalogue, the rooms are always perfectly done, but in stores the quality of their execution varies. Design experts love IKEA’s products but consider going to retrieve them a necessary evil. Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, a co-founder of the blog Apartment Therapy, praised IKEA for “the inventiveness of their designs” and “the usability of their furniture,” but, he added, “A brand-new IKEA store that’s fully stocked can be a happy place, but one that’s been trampled by the crowds on a Saturday is an ugly place to be.”

At the Malmö store, Albrecht and I ran into Gabrielle Granath and Linda Eriksson, who were tidying a room set.

“We find things all over the place,” Granath said. “We find trash in the trash bins.”

“Sometimes in the toilets,” Eriksson added.

Granath and Eriksson explained that their job was to keep the room sets looking fresh. They change the slipcovers once a week. They cut wicks on candles and dust fake computer screens. They make sure that all the price tags aim to the left.

Albrecht indicated a box of green fleece blankets, meant to complement a couch on display. “This we would call an ‘add-on,’ ” he explained. Add-ons are not the only way that IKEA encourages what it refers to, internally, as “unplanned purchasing.” When we reached the Market Hall section of the store, where IKEA sells pots, pans, and other lightweight items, Albrecht declared, “Now it’s the famous Open the Wallet section.” There, an abundance of cheap goods—flowerpots, slippers, lint rollers—encourages the customer to make a purchase, any purchase, the thinking being that IKEA shoppers buy either nothing or a lot. There is art in the visual merchandising, too. Albrecht showed me how IKEA uses a technique called “bulla bulla,” in which a bunch of items are purposely jumbled in bins, to create the impression of volume and, therefore, inexpensiveness.

IKEA constitutes a sort of borderless nation-state, with seats of power, redoubts of conservatism, second cities, imperial outposts, creative hubs, and administrative backwaters. In a letter that prefaces “A Furniture Dealer’s Testament,” the company’s constitutional text, Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder, wrote, “A well-known industrialist/politician once said that IKEA has had a greater impact on the democratization process than many political measures combined.”

The capital of IKEA is Älmhult, a small village on Sweden’s southern peninsula. Kamprad, who is eighty-five, opened the first IKEA store there, in 1953. Älmhult lies halfway between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, in Småland, a remote region of barren, rocky flatland. Smålanders are known, more or less, as the Scots of Sweden. Faced with the area’s harsh winters and lack of arable soil, many of them immigrated to Minnesota in the nineteenth century. Those who didn’t are renowned for their obstinacy and thrift. The Småland ethos is central to IKEA’s self-mythology. “Like Småland’s farmers, our values are down-to-earth,” an IKEA ad from 1981 read. “We have toiled hard in a difficult field to produce sweet harvests.” Clogs and a lip full of snus are still the favored uniform of Kamprad loyalists.