Twenty some years ago I used to work at a business that made and delivered sofas. They've got showrooms in key large cities in North America, fancy schmancy top end stuff.
The factory was a real place; the frames were made of solid wood and plywood, there was a sewing floor and even one (incredibly kooky) person whose sole job was to stuff the pillows. This guy was in a little room full of feathers all day, and they'd follow him around to the cantina and bathroom like a cartoon character.. but I digress.
My job there for a while was to make the sofa legs -- that was a sixteen step process, and they didn't even trust me to glue the boards together, just to do the cuts and shape the pieces. Sand and stain and wax and polish, yes sir!
They had a dedicated delivery crew, and what the article mentions about packaging is true -- things would be blanketed and wrapped up just the right way, then tetris-ed onto the truck. Sitting shotgun on that truck and hauling sofas up stairs and through various spaces was what I did after making the legs got too boring.
These sofas sold for $3000 ~ $4000 and up, and that was at the break of the millennium. I think the cheapest chair they had was around $2000. I should really swing by the showroom and see how much these are now -- and whether they're still made like they used to be.
You can still get made in the USA sofas with real hardwood, not rubber wood, which is fine, or worse, soft pine or particleboard or OSB) North Carolina was and is the center of solid wood furniture), and they still cost several to many thousands of dollars, and they will still last 100+ years with a couple reupholsterings or so, but most furniture comes from Asia now and is sold for 10x less, and is not worth reupholstering, and you will be lucky if it lasts 10 years.
The was a great company an old colleague of mine started called Interior Define that sourced custom furniture from China for a BluDot price but much higher quality, but they did not survive the pandemic and have since been sold in bankruptcy to a company that has reduced the quality to par
Having done a lot of DIY projects over the last decade, I've really shifted my view of OSB. Originally I would lump it in with particleboard, but I've since drastically changed my view of it. Particleboard is, truly, junk. OSB and plywood are both pretty good products, and for some uses superior to hardwoods (dimensional stability, for example). High quality plywoods are amazing products. OSB for structure or underlayments are really quite good.
Bought our sectional from a Bassett showroom almost 10 years ago. Extremely comfortable and the thing still looks brand new. Checked a few items on their website and found that they're still made in North Carolina.
I have at least 20 various pieces of furniture from IKEA that have lasted more than 10 years, some even closing on 20, even after multiple moves to various college dorms. Dresser drawers, dining table, sofa, bed platform, sit stand desk, etc.
I do not think I have ever thrown something out for breaking. Maybe gets scuffed or scratched up or chipped, but you can mostly use one of those latex paint touch up markers and make the damage nearly invisible.
I used to live in North Carolina, and some of the outlet stores for furniture are insane. Still expensive but compared to what I would get anywhere else for the same price quite good. Hickory in particular with all of those chair statues everywhere.
I have long been thinking about the idea of saving up for a while and doing a big re-furnish trip down to North Carolina with a moving truck.
The was a great company an old colleague of mine started called Interior Define
My wife and I have one of their sofas—it's quite nice, although our lives might've been easier with one of the Burrow-style sofas that are easily disassembled for moves.
I was mentioning in another thread, seeing good furniture made with engineered finger-jointed wood - which looked perfectly nice after finishing and felt super solid. A middle ground probably: not hardwood but very consistent, inexpensive and available by the mile. Probably with a hard finish on it.
When I was in grad school I accidentally wandered into the workshop for Montauk (https://montauksofa.com/collections/sofa/montauk/) with my girlfriend. They were very polite and I took their card. A few years later when I had some money, and my girlfriend was my wife, I still had the card and we bought one. More than twenty years since we still have it and it's just starting to get to where some of the cushions need the down stuffing refreshed. Quality.
How did you accidentally wander into their workshop? That place was in a random industrial zone off the 20 somewhere near Point St Claire.. Also super spooky, how did you know I was talking about them?
I also have a 20+ year old Montauk. I had the cushions replaced a couple of years ago because they don't offer a restuffing service. Not cheap, but should keep me going for another 20 years.
I think the problem I've noticed is - the furniture that is built to last very frequently fails the partner test - "that looks like old fart stuff".
Same sort of issue with cool remote controls. For example, la-z-boy has pretty good controls - remotes have better designs, have lots of adjustments, and motors seem to move faster. And they too fail the partner test - "that looks like old fart stuff"
I kind of like some stressless recliners.
oh, there is one class of furniture that has a lot of control - the massage chairs. Except they seem to be furniture you want to hide from everyone, they fail the "normal human being" test.
maybe I need to know pointers to other furniture/designs?
My cynical ass assumes it's because they know goddamn well no one under 60 years old has $4,000 to spend on a properly made sofa, irrespective of desire or taste. I make six figures and I certainly don't.
My furniture is all cheap particle board shit because I can't afford anything nicer because I'm spending all my money on a mortgage, food, gas, and student loans. I don't think it's a matter so much of nobody wanting to make good quality products so much as all the companies that did do that and priced their products accordingly are running out of customers, because we're all getting strip-mined by the rest of life's expenses going up all the goddamn time. I would love nothing more than a gorgeous, well made sofa that will last me a solid chunk of my remaining life, but where the fuck am I getting the money for it?
It's the boots theory of economics applied to everything. I'll spend $7,000 on sofas before I die and still have a sore ass.
Ugh this - my partner hates the sofa that I inherited from my mother, one that she told me she used to play on in the 1940s. It's a beast, with claw and ball feet that have stubbed many a toe, but I am fighting for its survival.
Partner sounds like a fashion victim. If social media consumption is making one's taste fond of low quality flashy crap I'd say grow some critical thinking skills.
It was some how relevant. I had a similar job making sofas in similar price range. We also had a crazy person stuffing everything. I asked why his job was not in the normal task roulation. They said for that job you have to be insanely strong, have insane endurance and you have to be insane. The guy tried it one time. How hard could it be? After 3 hours he literally couldnt lift his arms.
This. We paid $10k for two sofas. Leather-covered, solid quality. That was more than 20 years ago. They look a bit weathered now, from kids and pets, but they are holding up fine.
Pay for quality. It saves you money in the long run.
> Pay for quality. It saves you money in the long run.
Unlikely. Our sofa is like $300. Let's say it only lasts 3 years before it shows wear or we get bored of it and get another $300 one... your $5k sofa would have to last for 50 years to 'save money'. Not to mention the opportunity cost of those funds.
Pay for quality if you want quality, not in an attempt to save money.
Been putting off commenting for over 24 hours and this is still on the front page! I can confirm there are quality furniture makers here in the USA, though they can be hard to find.
A decade ago, I shopped for the first time at the most famous furniture store in this part of Texas: Gallery Furniture. Growing up anywhere within an hour or two of Houston in the 80s, Mattress Mack was more recognizable to a kid like me than any news anchor or any other television personality. Before the 80s was over, I'd probably seen him hop in the air hundreds of times with a fistful of dollars, talking about how Gallery Furniture will save you money, and he's still going strong today. He even toured big city and small town schools warning kids about drugs. Anyway, I had gotten by for years on hand-me-downs and IKEA furniture, but it was time to replace something ratty, and I walked in there with a vague impression that it might be more pricey than other stores. They told me it was all made in America (some places up north like Indiana?) and when I was asking about cheaper sofas that a guy over 6 feet tall could comfortably nap on, they pointed me to one they said was made locally in the Houston area. It was very long and had a very simple design and had firm foam that wouldn't sag (something I had asked for), and they let me have it for $500, and it felt like much better quality than a lot of the prettier stuff in other furniture stores.
A couple years later when I got married, we were looking for a nicer sofa, and I figured out that the local furniture maker that Gallery Furniture had been selling was called Living Designs Furniture and had a factory in the East End:
Their factory's showroom was very bare, but it was full of pieces, including a colorful chair in the shape of a stiletto shoe! We found an elegantly shaped light gray sofa long enough for me to sleep on, and again with high quality foam, and they built one with some slight customizations we wanted for $1,081 total. Unreal, because we have a white sofa from IKEA that isn't much less, but the quality is on another level!
I'd really like to see a resurgence of products like this in the USA. I've heard of some custom sofas costing several thousand, but somehow this local company is managing to sell at a lower price point. 18 years ago, a buddy of mine was living in Charleston, South Carolina. He had talked to a local high end furniture maker about doing a 3-year apprenticeship to learn how to make fine furniture, but in the end he knew he'd make very little per year in wages (he estimated $35,000 or so). Instead he pursued another dream and went to Napa Valley for a one-year course at the only open-wheel racing mechanic school in the country and ended up working on an Indy Car team for a dozen years. Hopefully more guys like him can find the furniture maker route feasible in the future if American consumers can escape the throwaway mindset. The average household doesn't need expensive Amish Craftsman offerings. A lot of people could afford this local furniture maker we have available, but I understand it could be a risky business venture to try to compete with the stuff shipped over the ocean.
I ripped the dust cover off and added 3 new frame stretchers made from 2x8 construction lumber (and tied other loose joints back together) and its done pretty well since then:
https://imgur.com/a/bqlLgW3 (wish I'd gotten a few more pictures, but I was tired by this point). Just shocking how terrible the construction is.
As if it wasn't bad enough that most consumer goods have completely bifurcated into "junk" and "luxury", now it's hard to even tell which products fall into which category, because there is so much junk now being sold as luxury.
I’ve had multiple fancy chairs, purchased from a famous high end brand with a very high end showroom in a very high end design center, fail very quickly. The failure was due to their vendor (fancy, in France) using nice solid finger jointed hardwood, well finished, in a place where that construction was completely inappropriate.
High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades.
Nice materials + pretty design does not necessarily result in a good product.
I recently visited Hong Kong. In a mall I spotted a shop called Sinéquanone (sic). It was flogging "French fashion", quite pricy "French fashion". Who knows, it might be French inspired. You can tell its authentic French thanks to the e acute and the trailing e!
Sine qua non is Latin.
To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder. Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever! Who could forget the Rolls Royce Silver Mist? Mist in German means dung, manure or shit. Someone thankfully noticed before it was released (Frankfurt motor show) and it became the Silver Shadow. Then there was "Consignia" ...
Yeah. Even at the time we knew West Elm wasn't high end, but we were at least expecting decent.
We know more now (and could afford better) whenever we have to finally replace this, but $2000 is a not-insignificant investment that shouldn't be a complete piece of crap.
the one that gets me (not furniture, but consumer good) is Yeti.
they seem to be slightly better made, but for SO MUCH more money. They have huge stores devoted to their products. Are people really spending money, and that much, on coolers?
That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn their leftover product to protect some secret of Dr Who purses that are bigger or magically organized on the inside, but because the entire value of the brand is "I can afford this and you cannot"
Luxury has ALWAYS been about signalling and displaying status and power. It's always about rubbing the prole's faces in their supposed supremacy. Remember, they have money because they are better than you, definitely not because there are systems and structures in place that make it easier to get rich for the already wealthy and connected.
Unfortunately it seems so many people really struggle to understand that while quality often costs a lot, costing a lot does not imply quality in any way. If you can afford to spend oodles on marketing for your product, you probably aren't spending as much on quality as people assume you would.
About 8 or so years ago my wife and I were really excited to buy our first “adult” piece of furniture (read, not-ikea). And we found a leather sofa we loved the look of at West Elm. But it really sucked. Thankfully we had another room that needed to be furnished and we threw it in there. But the thing was just not comfortable and the pillows started sagging after minimal use.
Since then almost every other couch we got was from ikea, since if it ended up sucking at least we didn’t pay 2-3x the cost for it. Which is sad really, I want a nice couch. I just don’t that paying 10-20x the cost wind just be a piece of junk.
At least with most IKEA products you assemble them yourself, so the level of quality is immediately apparent, and the pricing reflects it. I appreciate that straightforward approach.
Most everything I've bought there has outlasted my desire to keep using it. There are the occasional problems, like a blue table where the veneer shows a bright white mark wherever it gets nicked, but I feel like many criticisms are unfounded and often come across as elitist.
West elm has been pretty bad for most stuff for us too. Surprisingly we have an okay Urban couch from them that's held up well the last 5 years. The cushions haven't maintained their shape all that much and the feathers occasionally poke through which are my only complaints. Our little kids used to jump on it before we moved it downstairs so the frame was at least built well and it's still pretty comfortable.
Id never buy one again from them though after having everything else fail on us.
About 3 years ago after moving into a new house, I needed a new couch and wanted something that would wear reasonably well without getting into the higher end ($3k+). I found one on Apt2B which they were touting was built around an robotically-welded steel frame, lending to consistent durability. After reading many sofa reviews mentioning buckling particleboard, that sounded pretty good. There weren’t a ton of options due to pandemic shortages so I went for it, which cost me $1500.
It’s held up well so far. Cushions are showing some wear but nothing out of the ordinary, and the steel frame is indeed solid. It might even be worth reulphostering at some point down the road.
I don't live in the Bay Area anymore, but once great thing about living there was the amount of secondhand West Elm / Williams Sonoma furniture for reasonable prices that you could buy from rich people. Most of their quality is a crapshoot but at the right price you can find good deals for some of their items.
Eesh... I have a West Elm couch I got at an outlet for half off, so only $1200. It's fairly comfy and looks good, but I feel the back cushions will need to be restuffed sooner rather than later. I've had it less than a year.
I would expect the seller to fix that. Furniture at that price should last much longer. Don't you have any concept of 'merchantable quality' in the US?
When I moved to an area for work I wasn’t planning to live long-term I ended up buying the cheapest sofa in the store. I think it was around $270. After a prolonged illness I grew more and more displeased with it, to the point that I went and bought a better one after I was better. I bought from a place that advertised the inside of the sofa more than the outside. It was all about the build quality and how long it would last. Ended up coming out to around $3k if I remember correctly, but it has a lifetime warranty on everything but the cushions, and even the cushions after 6-7 years of daily use are just now only starting to get to the point of feeling like they are beginning to break in.
Quality can still be found, it just can’t be assumed. I think that’s the case for far too many things these days.
I've been wanting to buy nice furniture for a very long time... unfortunately the housing crisis has prevented my from ever having a sense of permanence. If I had known I'd live in my last place for nearly a decade I would have purchased nice things, but as it stands, until I have a mortgage of my own, I refuse to spend good money on something I may need to replace next year.
The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.
AirBnb should also be banned. And the people who profited off that startup, who must've known they were creating illegal hotels and destroying rental markets, should be hit with devastating fines, maybe also imprisoned.
Sofas, perhaps especially, are pretty hard to fit for non built-in furniture. I bought a used sofa off my brother. (Ironically, their replacements ended up being terrible because they lasted about a year with their dogs.)
I was also very lucky though. I thought I could configure the sectional in a couple different ways. Turned out I rolled the dice the right way because I couldn't. And only discovered this after many months because I was on crutches at the time and couldn't do anything about the sofa sitting in my garage.
Good furniture holds value especially buying used good furniture. If it doesn’t work out next year you can sell it for about what you paid if you haven’t destroyed it. Hard wood holds up to abuse much better than the particle board stuff too.
In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything <$300 is going to be nothing but fake materials like manufactured woods (if not even just veneer covered cardboard) and horrible cushion/fabric.
Anything decent doesn't really start until ~$1k, and anything in the $3k range you mentioned starts to become heirloom quality. As with anything, these are YMMV, but serves as a fast basis for my experience
The problem here is, that expensive doesn't mean quality.
Buying a cheap ikea piece and replacing it in a few years might still be a better choice than overpaying for an expensive piece, that's the same quality as ikea, but with a different tag on it (both 'brand tag' and 'price tag').
Unfortunately the premise of the article is that you can now easily drop $1k+ on a sofa that looks good on Instagram, but is constructed of particleboard and falls apart when you look at it sideways.
In the U.S. you can drop ~$5k on a Williams Sonoma et al sectional and get a cheaply made piece of junk. I've been happy with Maiden Home for around the same price. Wirecutter (now NY Times) has a couple good couch-buying articles.
We had an ikea klippan for around 10 years, and had to give it up when moving.
During these 10 years I haven't sat on any sofa, be in office lobbies, hotels, showrooms, friends' home that made me feel like it could be a significant upgrade upon my 400 USD sofa.
Sure that might not be usual, and I actually wouldn't recommend any other Ikea sofa in general (many were crappy when we were choosing ours). But price and marketting ("made in XXXX") is still only one factor in the wether the product will be any good.
A chair is a chair unless you get an actual office chair, but even then everyone copied herman miller already. I’ve sat in five figure chairs and there isn’t any magic there other than its provenance I suppose. So many of the cheap chairs being sold today are actually shameless copies of mid century design chairs that people still pay a ton of money for. You might as well pay literally a hundreth the price and get the same experience going generic eames.
I've purchased two sofas, one for $1200 from a trendy company and I returned it the day after it was delivered. And then one for $3500 from Design Within Reach that is absolutely terrific and built to outlast me. I'm not advertising for that store, I'm just agreeing that quality is still available but it was never inexpensive. Mentally I compare furniture to the quality of stuff my parents and grandparents had, and I remember that the couch my parents bought in the 90s cost $2000 then.
On the other hand I bought the current sofa some 20 years ago for about 600 Euro and it is still performing like day one. Probably a design failure. ;)
This article echoes something I've learned since we moved into a larger house this past summer: don't buy new furniture.†
We bought very nice leather couches a few years back (we have dogs, leather is the only option) and paid dearly for them. And they're great. (We looked carefully at the construction details before buying.)
This summer, we had some rooms we cared a lot about and others we just needed to fill in some blanks in, and we camped Facebook Marketplace looking for stuff. Pretty soon, even the living room was getting stuff we found on Facebook, at comparable levels of quality to our old "new" furniture, and at pennies on the dollar. People are simply always getting rid of good stuff, and there isn't a meaningful secondary market for it; they're just thrilled you're getting it out of their house and getting a couple bucks in the process.
I submit that you would end up with a better-furnished room faster, more easily, and at a fraction of the cost of high-end furniture retailers simply with Facebook Marketplace and TaskRabbit (for near-instant delivery).
† Leastways, not if you live in a major North American metro.
Few years ago I moved to another country and had to get rid of everything I had minus ~25kg.
It's bloody hard to get rid of a lot of stuff. I had a great leather sofa, about 15-20 years old (inherited from my grandparents) still in great condition, but I couldn't get rid of it at any price and none of the charity shops took it because it was missing some fire hazard label (sigh...). Same with almost everything: I sold my 2-year old £1,200 mattress for £50 (and I had to practically beg to guy to take it, because it would have been a complete shame to chuck it). Washing machine, fridge, all the "little stuff" (cutlery, books, DVDs, what-have-you). I ended up putting a lot outside "free stuff" and that got rid of a lot.
Actually the only things I managed to sell was an IKEA sleeping sofa and an IKEA dinner table set.
That said, since then I found that actually finding good stuff isn't always easy.
I've moved countries three times and that's been my experience each time.
What's more, actually selling stuff is often such a time consuming hassle (posting, dealing with replies, scheduling pick ups, dealing with flakes) that in a lot of cases you're better off just paying trash hauling service to just come pick it all up in a single go.
I ended up having to discard a perfectly good desktop computer and a high-end scanner because nobody wanted them, not even for free. It's really frustrating, not because I missed out on making some money, but because of how wasteful it feels.
However, monitors seem to sell immediately every time.
It's actually illegal to sell a used mattress in the US - and there are very legitimate public health reasons for the being the case. You can't really clean one - that's especially true of foam, and they can be riddled with lice, bedbugs, and all kinds of creepy crawlies.
Once upon a time when moving countries people would pay for a shipping container... another unfortunate side effect of everything becoming shit - it's not even worth taking stuff with you.
What I find helpful with buying IKEA items second hand, I know the exact measurements and can find more infos online. With other furniture items, it much harder. And their names are distinct so I can just search for it.
I've looked around for some quality used furniture at a decent price, it's very hard to find. Just gave up and bought some stuff on article.com which has been pretty ok bang for the buck for me in the past.
> People are simply always getting rid of good stuff
I suppose there’s an interesting survivorship thing going on here. A poorly-built couch probably won’t even last 10 years. And if it does, somehow, you’ll know as soon as you sit on it if it’s about to turn into dust based on the squeaking and general instability. If it still feels solid and you don’t sink into it so deep that you can’t stand up again there’s a decent chance it’ll last another 10 years.
I would worry about stuff like that if I was buying cloth furniture. I am not worried about it buying high-end leather furniture. It seems about as likely as getting bedbugs from a used car (which also happens! but nobody blinks about buying a used car). You're generally buying from people's houses. Maybe I'd be concerned about grabbing something from an apartment.
Learned this 30 years ago. Durable quality goods are generally best bought used, but furniture requires close inspection to avoid pests.
Custom Macy's extra long couch from ~2000 is the best thing ever. You sink into it and it holds up. Bought used-new for $1k when a friend paid $4k but was delivered 2 by mistake.
Everything is bad these days, not just the sofas.
1. The new switches I bought broke before the old ones, which are over 20 years old.
2. LED bulbs last less than incandescent bulbs, even with a 20-year warranty.
3. The new cell phone's screen breaks very easily, it's not like the old Nokia's.
And nowadays something expensive is no longer guaranteed to last.
This is why I value old things so much:
I have an old chair to work with, it's not a good chair, but it's better than anything new. I did a restoration instead of buying a new one because the new one might not last long.
I have a 10 year old car, I'm scared to buy a new one with the bizarre stories
about new 3 cylinder engines breaking (throwaway engines?)
I try to use old things as much as possible. I stopped using an old Android when SSL stopped working. It's not a matter of lack of money, it's a lack of confidence in new things.
The last brand that I gave some value to was Sansumg. My last cell phone... THEY FORGOT to add a piece to fix the flat cable for the on/off button. And twice the on/off button stopped working, and twice I sent it to technical assistance. The third time I opened the phone and repaired the button myself. My two Sansumg TVs break a few days after the warranty ends.
On the electronics front I'd beg to differ. Apple has raised the quality bar on electronics by a mile in the last couple of decades. The gadgetry I remember from the eighties and nineties was very cheaply made with plastics that warped or cracked (or both) and cheap switches made of molded plastic and a ballpen spring. Casette player gears were mostly made of that white plastic that always wore down with not much usage. I went through many "high end" walkmans that did not last more than a couple of years each.
It's all too easy to see the past through rose tinted glasses. Also remember that the "built to last" stuff from the past is often an example of survivorship bias.
Bought a Framework laptop last year to make sure I never get into a situation of having to throw away a whole expensive laptop just because the manufacturer decided I shouldn't be able to replace or upgrade parts easily or cheaply myself.
Of course, there have been many bad things in the past. Floppy disks, cassettes and VHS were horrible technologies.
Did you use tube radios? They broke all the time.
The difference is that they weren't intentionally horrible, they were limitations of an era.
But at some point, devices start to last a long time. My parents' first refrigerator ran without problems for over 10 years.
I've had far fewer problems with CDS and CD players than with cassette players.
And we used to have a lot of low quality items, but now it's much harder to find good quality items. And brand means almost nothing. Even Apple has been selling notebooks with horrible keyboards for years. I'm just using an Apple Notebook now, I've been waiting for years for them to change the keyboard.... The Nitendo Switch Joystick has a drift problem and Nintendo ignores it...
There is no reason for a new Samsung TV to break after a year of use. Or LEDs.
Or power switches.
It's not a technical limitation, it's a choice.
I think when they try to hedonically adjust for inflation - they do a terrible job.
The quality of everything is trash. And if you want something that has the type of quality you used to get 30 years ago - you're going to pay close to 4-10x as much.
Everyone is selling trash for cheap. We live in a mall of garbage.
The worst part of it for me is how I can't really trust anything. Cheap, expensive, brand, generic, it doesn't matter, I can't trust it. I feel like I can only trust stuff I've made myself. If only I had infinite time to learn how to make everything.
The LED bulbs are a particular travesty. At least they are better than how we polluted everything with CF bulbs.
Only buy CRI 95+ (99 if you can find them). Not because of the color rendering quality (although that is a great benefit), but because they will tend to have appropriately derated other parts of the circuit, which are the elements that fail. They can do this for that product because at the more upmarket price, they can afford the additional 0.02 in COGS.
As to Nokia phones, well yeah. I understand there is a real market for them now, since they found they are very effective black box flight recorders.
Nokia phones weren't as durable as you remember. A Nokia phone would hardy last 2 years with limited use, either the battery or power connector would die quickly. iPhones get way more usage than Nokias and they easily last 3 years.
Also I've literally never had a LED bulb die on me.
I don't know what kind of nokia your talking about but I use a 12 year old nokia feature phone, works fine, very robust, had countless drops, onto countless surfaces, often gets smushed when I go rock climbing and forget it's in my pocket. The battery is barely working but I still get 4 or 5 days charge on it.
I will have to upgrade soon to a 4G version because the 3G bands are getting repurposed in the UK over the next few years. Otherwise I would have kept going with it. Thankfully HMD still make the ones that run the S3 OS... which is immediately obvious when they actually bother quoting standby time in the specs; the KaiOS ones are basically just a worse android phone with all the same power drain issues and not enough compute or utility to justify it.
I think there are still quality products out there, but they are rare and expensive and you have to spend forever researching to figure out which products are :/
still are as so many see to be purchased and then running the ground for short term profits
I recently switched from my 5.5 yrs old Xiaomi Mi 8 to Google Pixel 8. The new phone is 20% more expensive (inflation adjusted!) and at almost all metrics a bit worse than the old one. The only thing better is a camera (and I suspect it is because of the software, not the hardware). There are other departments where Pixel is better (CPU, wireless charging, newer OS version, eSIM support), but I don't use it.
>Everything is bad these days, not just the sofas.
When these conversations happens, I always wonder why people want some of these items to last forever.
Are you going to stick with that 10 year old plasma TV? Great. I want new tech, and this stuff moves fast. Furniture is a bit different, but my parents had all kinds of good, long-lasting stuff that no one wants because it's out of style.
Our cheap ikea couch keeps lasting, preventing us from buying a nice, new one. We can't throw it out of it's not broken.
It is long known that companies who sell good quality products go out of business after a couple decades at most, they saturate their market and because no one needs to renew, the company dies.
Ironically ikea HAS to sell quality (for price) because they are such a big brand. Their stuff is great quality for price, so people keep coming back for upgrades, when they can afford it.
I've had my 65" LED Samsung smart TV for almost 10 years now... it cost about $800 back then. I thought about replacing it recently, but decided against it because it's working great and I don't feel like I'd be gaining much to buy a newer TV. Technology hasn't really advanced that much since 2014...
> I always wonder why people want some of these items to last forever.
My friend had a NEW Ford that went to the workshop more than 10 times in the first year of use. It's about trust that I will turn on the device and it will work.
> I want new tech
Buy it. I met people who sold their old iPhone and bought a new model every year, nothing against that. My problem is if the IPhone in this first year broke two or more times like my Sansumg.
The irony here especially with furniture is that if you’re rich enough to buy real quality design pieces you’ll sell them for more than you bought them for when you’re ready to move on
I fully agree that new is very often worse than old.
I've had to return 3 new iPhones in a row for manufacturing defects and out of box software errors. A TV lasts me maybe 4 years before it's 'broken' and needs to be replaced.' Home appliance longevity is laughable now.. (especially Samsung, my gosh.) I've purchased 5 new cars over the past 15 years or so, only one of which didn't have serious problems from new that had to be dealt with.. or could not be resolved/etc. We're just hitting bottom here, the next 10 years are going to be pretty rough.
My experience:
Our last two washer lasted for 20 years each. We have only third one now and first one did not break :)
I have bought many (6) smartphones and non has broken during my usage and also after I passed them to others.
We have 4th TV at home and each one was fully working when we replaced it after ~ 10 years. Current one (Sony), our first LCD is from 2012 and works perfectly (with just new set top box).
I have bought/got many laptops and any of them has broken. I have laptop from 1996 or 1998 which still works. There were software issues there, but they are fixable by update. (I have never bought Acer or Asus though)
You're exaggerating about light-bulbs. There is no way LEDs last less than incandescents. If you are experiencing this, its possible your wiring is bad. You should call an electrician and have them check that out.
There are some very bad, cheap LEDs on the market. Sometimes even under name brands. I've learned to be pretty picky about which ones I buy, both in terms of their longevity as well as the quality of the light.
You are absolutely incorrect. Most of the LED bulbs on the market have incredibly poorly designed power circuits that absolutely cook the passive components.
I hear this a lot, but my fairly inexpensive IKEA sofa is about eight years old with no problems at all so far.
EDIT: Actually, in general I've found that my IKEA furniture has done pretty well (basically everything in the house is IKEA) with the sole exception of a "Lack" coffee table, whose surface is kinda disintegrating after 8 years (I think it's basically made of cardboard with a veneer...). The name should perhaps have been a warning.
For some reason people hate IKEA in the US. Was trying to sell a standing desk I bought there for 750$ and nobody wanted it. Ended up selling it for 150$. I also had a Jarvis and it was gone in an instant, even though the IKEA one was much much better.
I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
IKEA is beloved by many in the US and generally one of the most specifically in-demand brands in the market for used contemporary furniture. You might just be in an unusual region or had some other reasons why your listings didn't perform the way you expected.
That said, I am one of those people who doesn't get a lot from them so I can speak to some of criticism. Part of it is just the aesthetic, and theirs doesn't match how I decorate my own space or what I usually feel good around. That's just the nature of aesthetics, though, and there's always going to be some difference in taste between any two people and any two regions.
As for quality, though, I think the critique you hear reflects the quality of their budget products. If you're eyeing modern or euro designs at a fancy furniture studio and then go to IKEA to find a cheap approximation, you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
That shouldn't rally be a surprise (cheap is cheap for a reason) and doesn't hold true for their mid-range and higher products. And heck, it's not even really fair when Walmart and Target furniture isn't any better, but it's enough to keep feeding the reputation.
I think the reason for this is simple: Ikea does make some pretty poor-quality furniture, but it's often on the floor right next to some very well-built stuff that will last for many years.
Price is sometimes an indicator (I bought two Ikea dressers ~15 years ago; I kept the cheaper one for only a few years while the more expensive one is still going strong) but not always (my 18-year-old sofa was the entry-level option at the time).
Same here — I have an Ikea bedframe that’s nearly a 2 decades old at this point and has moved four times. An office chair lasted me 7 years. Bookcases over a decade old.
I grew up in a nearly all Ikea household, and it’s only later in life I have discovered their reputation.
$750 for an IKEA desk is crazy money. Does it have hydraulics to raise and lower the desk?
But depreciation on IKEA is huge because while it can last a long time within a household, it moves very poorly so if it has been moved or reassembled once or twice, it’s likely near end of life. But hard to evaluate that, it’s not like it has an odometer — hence value for used it very low.
I think a lot of this is attached to a puritan-based work ethic. If something isn't hard to do, or require a lot of time and energy then it's not of high quality or worth having.
Yeah, I dunno, maybe it’s different stuff in the US? I know at least some of the items are different.
With the exception of the aforementioned table (which I think cost about 8 euro at the time, so, really, what did I expect) I’ve found all their stuff to be of very decent quality, certainly better than what you could get from ‘traditional’ furniture stores at the same price.
In the US alot of peoples first experience with Ikea is buying the cheapest desk, couch, bookcase, etc. for a dorm room or first apartment. And those are largely trash that won't survive a move, spilled water, accidental bump, etc.
They have a line of pine furniture I like, as well as other things that are solid for the price (their kitchen cabinets) but you only have one chance to make a first impression as they say.
I dislike their engineered wood stuff. It’s decent for furnishing an apartment but for more permanent things real hardwood just feels nicer, and IKEA has relatively few options with that material.
I had an engineered wood bed frame from them split in half, whereas an older IKEA pine (not hardwood but whatever) bed frame still lives on.
> I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.
Back in 2012 I furnished a home with Ikea furniture.
Yes I hate them.
You'd spend $60 on a book case and spend the next 4 hours trying to understand what the instructions mean and how to build it. You also needed a partner to hold corners together.
Now today, the furniture instructions are better and instead 16 different weird fastener, there are 8.
Its a frustration thing. Ikea didn't really do anything but be low cost. We blame Ikea like we blame Walmart for having drug addicts.
I have an Ikea Lillberg sofa from 2005 that I never dreamed I would hold onto as long as I have.
Every time I've moved, I think this will be the time I replace it, but the joinery has stayed rock-solid, the wood has aged beautifully (though I admit this is likely owing to a lack of pets or children) and even the upholstery has never pilled or visibly worn (though I keep thinking about ordering a replacement slipcover set from Comfort Works, which makes aftermarket upgrades for long-since-discontinued Ikea products). And the minimalist, Danish-influenced style somehow never looks out of place no matter what else I put around it.
This article has me thinking I may yet keep the Lillberg for years to come.
I got an IKEA couch about 9 years ago. It was like... $700? The construction is definitely very cheap and you can tell if you flip it on its back, but it's very comfortable and sturdy enough that it still feels solid in normal use.
I don't think "cheap" construction is necessarily a bad thing, honestly. There's ways to do cheap construction such that it works just fine.
You're quite correct about the Lack. They're cheap as hell (15 bucks at time of writing?), but as a result quite manipulatable, such as creating 3d printer enclosures [0]. You can see some of their insides as they go through the process.
Also… I haven’t priced out Lack tables in a while but it looks like they’re still only $20?! I last bought one in probably 2006 and they were $20CAD at the time.
I still own some Billies made in 1995 or so by Ikea. Literally massive wood and damn good book shelves.
The ones bought by me in 2008 or so very noticeably less well build but still ok.
The ones we bought in 2018 or so are shit, especially the shelves are so thin that they begin to sag.
In 2008 or so a friend of mine bought a "kallax" (another name then) and it was awesome, it's still in his basement and looks good. We bought one in 2023 and it's basically only paint, some "wood" and air. It's ok to store stuff in, but it's impossible to drill a screw into the wood. It's like trying to screw paper.
KALLAX used to be EXPEDIT. Both were made from honeycombed cardboard (mostly air, as you say) covered with very thin sheets of painted MDF. Maybe there was a time EXPEDIT was more solid, but I had one in the 1990s, and it was just like this.
You can drill the thin wood in IKEA furniture like this, but you have to reinforce it.
IKEA has always had a mix of wobbly instacrap and solid stuff. I remember they made a short-lived modular shelf called BRODER [1], which was solid steel and came in wall-mounted or freestanding configurations, the kind of solid thing you want in a garage or storage space. I was shocked at how high-end it was. It was discontinued to cost and low sales.
At some point in my twenties, I decided it was time to upgrade from my broke college student IKEA lifestyle which to me meant West Elm. Every thing I got from West Elm was absolute garbage and none of it lasted more than a handful of years.
Now I'm in the prime of my career and could move up to something actually nice if I really wanted to, like Design Within Reach (truly the most ironic business name in existence). But it's just so hard for me to justify a 5x or more price jump, when, honestly, the IKEA furniture I have has been so good.
I have a decade-old IKEA couch that is still in great shape despite surviving cats, dogs, young children, a snoring spouse who slept on it every night for about a year, and being mostly occupied throughout the entire pandemic. It's a tank, and still looks good to me.
I think I've committed myself to having a style that is basically "IKEA + some vintage stuff" which seems to work well quality wise and is about an order of magnitude cheaper than getting new quality non-IKEA furniture.
After a lot of digging a few years ago, I settled on the IKEA Finnala. So far it's held up pretty well.
It's not as well made as quality pieces, but I worked from the assumption that any couch I bought would be trash. Some of the nice things about a buying into a system like the Finnala are that when an arm, cushion, cover, or whatever fails, I can just replace that piece; there are aftermarket covers and legs; if I move it can be disassembled; and if a new place is smaller, the whole thing doesn't have to be trashed.
I love quality furniture, but it doesn't always fit the bill for a society where people can't afford a single family house or put down roots. (Note: that still doesn't necessarily justify all the items being sold today that are destined for a landfill in a few years.)
I avoided the LACK after seeing someone spill drink and watching it bubble up like paper.
My coffee table is still from IKEA, but it’s metal. I’ve had it for 11 years now. It’s on wheels and some of them look like they’ve seen some stress over the years… and it’s been moved to 8 homes in those 11 years, which could have been the cause. But it still works great and I don’t know the the average person visiting my home would notice that.
I have been thinking of getting something a little larger and more grown up, but I love the functionality of the wheels, how it can get out of the way, and that I don’t have to baby it. It doesn’t look like they sell it anymore, but it was $40 well spent.
Ditto, my kivik has lasted so well that i didnt have the heart to get rid of it. It helps that there are many stores that sell custom covers of all kinds of fabrics.
IKEA has also however gone downhill compared to ~10 years ago, however. A Poang today, compared to 10 years ago: does not have beveled edges on the wood (which makes it look cheaper and feel less 'soft'), and is even slightly narrower, so that the old cushions dont really fit in the new one.
I think we are seing the effect of increasing prices and breakdown of global supply chains there
I've found Ikea furniture is great and lasts a long time as long as you don't move it to another apartment, that seems to really stress the joints and it will get rickety after 2-3 moves.
The article goes on about the quality of manufacturing, which is very fair, but something that bugs me, and it seems to apply to cheap sofas as well as very expensive ones.
Why are so many of them just plain uncomfortable? I'm looking for one I want right now, and I have to go around a furniture shop and try each out and I reckon, maybe 1/4 of them are suitable for a place you might enjoy sitting in.
The high end furniture shops seem to be the worst, i've seen 4 figure sofas that are the most uncomfortable thing I ever tried. Champions of form over function.
My last favourite sofa was around 2500 I guess, lasted 10 years, was excellently comfortable, but was unfortunately the wrong shape for my new place, I have not found anything anywhere near as good as that one.
It may be my height, much furniture seems a little off to me, and it is hard in general for me to find things I'm happy with.
I think this speaks to an important factor which is that most of us have little awareness of our posture and typical sofa designs reflect this. We want sofas to 'collapse' on rather than to sit comfortably. I became aware of this from learning the Alexander Technique to deal with another issue.
One hack you can perform on most sofas is to add some height to the rear legs using castors or wooden blocks or something. This tilts it forward a bit. Sitting back or reclining is fine in a dentist's chair because there's head support but it's no good on a sofa! There our head and spines need to be balanced.
Anyhow -- quality of materials and design are both important but the fact is that average bodily awareness is poor and this is a fundamental reason why our furniture is worse than it needs to be!
The plush sofa you sink deep into for TV at the end of the day has a different function than the firm sofa your dinner guests sit on the front of while sipping cocktails, etc
Many of the sofas you were looking at were probably designed for a different function than you were seeking.
I just spent about $700 having new cushions made for a 50+ year old Danish Teak sofa that I inherited from my grandparents. The original cushions were long gone, but the wooden frame was still in great condition.
I sourced high-quality foam and wool upholstery fabric from Maharam and took those to one of the best upholsterers/furniture restorers in Los Angeles. They did a wonderful job and now I have a super-comfortable couch with many good childhood memories, that should last me another 25 years before I need to replace the cushions again.
Point being, get a classic old piece and restore it. It will last a lifetime.
Is it super heavy? I've noticed weight often equals how long something will last in good condition, and old furniture is often way heavier and bulkier.
Not the OP, but my family has a bunch of Danish teak furniture, as does my mom. The sofas are not super heavy. Cushions on a frame. You can see under it. Now, there's no bed inside. My mom's was re-upholstered once. Ours isn't old enough for that yet. We've re-upholstered the dining chairs a couple of times.
As for other pieces of furniture, e.g., cabinets and stuff, we bought them used from a place that combed estate sales in Denmark for furniture and sold it in the US. One attraction is that the old furniture is smaller, so it works in a smaller house.
I owned a bunch of mid-century Danish/Swedish furnitures, and they're generally pretty light. They tend to have slimmer profiles for the "modern" appearance, so less material. Also solid wood tend to be lighter than engineered wood.
I bought a used Nieri leather sofa recently for a seventh of the original price. It is supposed to be a solid high end sofa (or so the seller said; it was the most expensive sofa of the hundred they were selling), but is feather light. I was suspicious, but bought it anyway because I liked it. So far it has withstanded the kid jumping on it in various ways.
I wonder, is it even possible it's solidly made despite being very light?
Two points actually: Teak is great. How it gets around to being a sofa is not. This is a doubly good thing you're doing keeping it going instead of disposing of it like most people would.
Readit News
The factory was a real place; the frames were made of solid wood and plywood, there was a sewing floor and even one (incredibly kooky) person whose sole job was to stuff the pillows. This guy was in a little room full of feathers all day, and they'd follow him around to the cantina and bathroom like a cartoon character.. but I digress.
My job there for a while was to make the sofa legs -- that was a sixteen step process, and they didn't even trust me to glue the boards together, just to do the cuts and shape the pieces. Sand and stain and wax and polish, yes sir!
They had a dedicated delivery crew, and what the article mentions about packaging is true -- things would be blanketed and wrapped up just the right way, then tetris-ed onto the truck. Sitting shotgun on that truck and hauling sofas up stairs and through various spaces was what I did after making the legs got too boring.
These sofas sold for $3000 ~ $4000 and up, and that was at the break of the millennium. I think the cheapest chair they had was around $2000. I should really swing by the showroom and see how much these are now -- and whether they're still made like they used to be.
The was a great company an old colleague of mine started called Interior Define that sourced custom furniture from China for a BluDot price but much higher quality, but they did not survive the pandemic and have since been sold in bankruptcy to a company that has reduced the quality to par
Having done a lot of DIY projects over the last decade, I've really shifted my view of OSB. Originally I would lump it in with particleboard, but I've since drastically changed my view of it. Particleboard is, truly, junk. OSB and plywood are both pretty good products, and for some uses superior to hardwoods (dimensional stability, for example). High quality plywoods are amazing products. OSB for structure or underlayments are really quite good.
It's made from solid wood and stuffed with real feather down. It's several years old now and has shown no signs of aging.
Where? I went around furniture stores and found it hard to discern any relationship between price and quality.
I have at least 20 various pieces of furniture from IKEA that have lasted more than 10 years, some even closing on 20, even after multiple moves to various college dorms. Dresser drawers, dining table, sofa, bed platform, sit stand desk, etc.
I do not think I have ever thrown something out for breaking. Maybe gets scuffed or scratched up or chipped, but you can mostly use one of those latex paint touch up markers and make the damage nearly invisible.
You can still get quality, you just have to pay for it.
I have long been thinking about the idea of saving up for a while and doing a big re-furnish trip down to North Carolina with a moving truck.
My wife and I have one of their sofas—it's quite nice, although our lives might've been easier with one of the Burrow-style sofas that are easily disassembled for moves.
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Same sort of issue with cool remote controls. For example, la-z-boy has pretty good controls - remotes have better designs, have lots of adjustments, and motors seem to move faster. And they too fail the partner test - "that looks like old fart stuff"
I kind of like some stressless recliners.
oh, there is one class of furniture that has a lot of control - the massage chairs. Except they seem to be furniture you want to hide from everyone, they fail the "normal human being" test.
maybe I need to know pointers to other furniture/designs?
My furniture is all cheap particle board shit because I can't afford anything nicer because I'm spending all my money on a mortgage, food, gas, and student loans. I don't think it's a matter so much of nobody wanting to make good quality products so much as all the companies that did do that and priced their products accordingly are running out of customers, because we're all getting strip-mined by the rest of life's expenses going up all the goddamn time. I would love nothing more than a gorgeous, well made sofa that will last me a solid chunk of my remaining life, but where the fuck am I getting the money for it?
It's the boots theory of economics applied to everything. I'll spend $7,000 on sofas before I die and still have a sore ass.
People learn to be comfy over time. I dont need to live life like i dont know what I'm doing.
Getting old rocks, but maybe that says more about the terrible quality of life during my younger years then it does about current year.
Hahah
Pay for quality. It saves you money in the long run.
Unlikely. Our sofa is like $300. Let's say it only lasts 3 years before it shows wear or we get bored of it and get another $300 one... your $5k sofa would have to last for 50 years to 'save money'. Not to mention the opportunity cost of those funds.
Pay for quality if you want quality, not in an attempt to save money.
*tetris-ed and Sokoban-ed onto the truck
(Sorry, couldn't help myself)
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A decade ago, I shopped for the first time at the most famous furniture store in this part of Texas: Gallery Furniture. Growing up anywhere within an hour or two of Houston in the 80s, Mattress Mack was more recognizable to a kid like me than any news anchor or any other television personality. Before the 80s was over, I'd probably seen him hop in the air hundreds of times with a fistful of dollars, talking about how Gallery Furniture will save you money, and he's still going strong today. He even toured big city and small town schools warning kids about drugs. Anyway, I had gotten by for years on hand-me-downs and IKEA furniture, but it was time to replace something ratty, and I walked in there with a vague impression that it might be more pricey than other stores. They told me it was all made in America (some places up north like Indiana?) and when I was asking about cheaper sofas that a guy over 6 feet tall could comfortably nap on, they pointed me to one they said was made locally in the Houston area. It was very long and had a very simple design and had firm foam that wouldn't sag (something I had asked for), and they let me have it for $500, and it felt like much better quality than a lot of the prettier stuff in other furniture stores.
A couple years later when I got married, we were looking for a nicer sofa, and I figured out that the local furniture maker that Gallery Furniture had been selling was called Living Designs Furniture and had a factory in the East End:
https://www.livingdesignsfurniture.com
Their factory's showroom was very bare, but it was full of pieces, including a colorful chair in the shape of a stiletto shoe! We found an elegantly shaped light gray sofa long enough for me to sleep on, and again with high quality foam, and they built one with some slight customizations we wanted for $1,081 total. Unreal, because we have a white sofa from IKEA that isn't much less, but the quality is on another level!
I'd really like to see a resurgence of products like this in the USA. I've heard of some custom sofas costing several thousand, but somehow this local company is managing to sell at a lower price point. 18 years ago, a buddy of mine was living in Charleston, South Carolina. He had talked to a local high end furniture maker about doing a 3-year apprenticeship to learn how to make fine furniture, but in the end he knew he'd make very little per year in wages (he estimated $35,000 or so). Instead he pursued another dream and went to Napa Valley for a one-year course at the only open-wheel racing mechanic school in the country and ended up working on an Indy Car team for a dozen years. Hopefully more guys like him can find the furniture maker route feasible in the future if American consumers can escape the throwaway mindset. The average household doesn't need expensive Amish Craftsman offerings. A lot of people could afford this local furniture maker we have available, but I understand it could be a risky business venture to try to compete with the stuff shipped over the ocean.
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The whole thing is just stapled together OSB.
I ripped the dust cover off and added 3 new frame stretchers made from 2x8 construction lumber (and tied other loose joints back together) and its done pretty well since then: https://imgur.com/a/bqlLgW3 (wish I'd gotten a few more pictures, but I was tired by this point). Just shocking how terrible the construction is.
High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades.
Nice materials + pretty design does not necessarily result in a good product.
Sine qua non is Latin.
To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder. Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever! Who could forget the Rolls Royce Silver Mist? Mist in German means dung, manure or shit. Someone thankfully noticed before it was released (Frankfurt motor show) and it became the Silver Shadow. Then there was "Consignia" ...
We know more now (and could afford better) whenever we have to finally replace this, but $2000 is a not-insignificant investment that shouldn't be a complete piece of crap.
they seem to be slightly better made, but for SO MUCH more money. They have huge stores devoted to their products. Are people really spending money, and that much, on coolers?
That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn their leftover product to protect some secret of Dr Who purses that are bigger or magically organized on the inside, but because the entire value of the brand is "I can afford this and you cannot"
Luxury has ALWAYS been about signalling and displaying status and power. It's always about rubbing the prole's faces in their supposed supremacy. Remember, they have money because they are better than you, definitely not because there are systems and structures in place that make it easier to get rich for the already wealthy and connected.
Unfortunately it seems so many people really struggle to understand that while quality often costs a lot, costing a lot does not imply quality in any way. If you can afford to spend oodles on marketing for your product, you probably aren't spending as much on quality as people assume you would.
Since then almost every other couch we got was from ikea, since if it ended up sucking at least we didn’t pay 2-3x the cost for it. Which is sad really, I want a nice couch. I just don’t that paying 10-20x the cost wind just be a piece of junk.
Here's a quick overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0nPPc2-jpE
It's almost like a "How to shop for nice stuff at IKEA 101" and covers:
At least with most IKEA products you assemble them yourself, so the level of quality is immediately apparent, and the pricing reflects it. I appreciate that straightforward approach.
Most everything I've bought there has outlasted my desire to keep using it. There are the occasional problems, like a blue table where the veneer shows a bright white mark wherever it gets nicked, but I feel like many criticisms are unfounded and often come across as elitist.
Id never buy one again from them though after having everything else fail on us.
About 3 years ago after moving into a new house, I needed a new couch and wanted something that would wear reasonably well without getting into the higher end ($3k+). I found one on Apt2B which they were touting was built around an robotically-welded steel frame, lending to consistent durability. After reading many sofa reviews mentioning buckling particleboard, that sounded pretty good. There weren’t a ton of options due to pandemic shortages so I went for it, which cost me $1500.
It’s held up well so far. Cushions are showing some wear but nothing out of the ordinary, and the steel frame is indeed solid. It might even be worth reulphostering at some point down the road.
Installing new is pretty cheap and easy - $10 roll and a staple gun. Or just leave it off
Quality can still be found, it just can’t be assumed. I think that’s the case for far too many things these days.
The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.
AirBnb should also be banned. And the people who profited off that startup, who must've known they were creating illegal hotels and destroying rental markets, should be hit with devastating fines, maybe also imprisoned.
I was also very lucky though. I thought I could configure the sectional in a couple different ways. Turned out I rolled the dice the right way because I couldn't. And only discovered this after many months because I was on crutches at the time and couldn't do anything about the sofa sitting in my garage.
In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything <$300 is going to be nothing but fake materials like manufactured woods (if not even just veneer covered cardboard) and horrible cushion/fabric.
Anything decent doesn't really start until ~$1k, and anything in the $3k range you mentioned starts to become heirloom quality. As with anything, these are YMMV, but serves as a fast basis for my experience
The problem here is, that expensive doesn't mean quality.
Buying a cheap ikea piece and replacing it in a few years might still be a better choice than overpaying for an expensive piece, that's the same quality as ikea, but with a different tag on it (both 'brand tag' and 'price tag').
During these 10 years I haven't sat on any sofa, be in office lobbies, hotels, showrooms, friends' home that made me feel like it could be a significant upgrade upon my 400 USD sofa.
Sure that might not be usual, and I actually wouldn't recommend any other Ikea sofa in general (many were crappy when we were choosing ours). But price and marketting ("made in XXXX") is still only one factor in the wether the product will be any good.
We bought very nice leather couches a few years back (we have dogs, leather is the only option) and paid dearly for them. And they're great. (We looked carefully at the construction details before buying.)
This summer, we had some rooms we cared a lot about and others we just needed to fill in some blanks in, and we camped Facebook Marketplace looking for stuff. Pretty soon, even the living room was getting stuff we found on Facebook, at comparable levels of quality to our old "new" furniture, and at pennies on the dollar. People are simply always getting rid of good stuff, and there isn't a meaningful secondary market for it; they're just thrilled you're getting it out of their house and getting a couple bucks in the process.
I submit that you would end up with a better-furnished room faster, more easily, and at a fraction of the cost of high-end furniture retailers simply with Facebook Marketplace and TaskRabbit (for near-instant delivery).
† Leastways, not if you live in a major North American metro.
It's bloody hard to get rid of a lot of stuff. I had a great leather sofa, about 15-20 years old (inherited from my grandparents) still in great condition, but I couldn't get rid of it at any price and none of the charity shops took it because it was missing some fire hazard label (sigh...). Same with almost everything: I sold my 2-year old £1,200 mattress for £50 (and I had to practically beg to guy to take it, because it would have been a complete shame to chuck it). Washing machine, fridge, all the "little stuff" (cutlery, books, DVDs, what-have-you). I ended up putting a lot outside "free stuff" and that got rid of a lot.
Actually the only things I managed to sell was an IKEA sleeping sofa and an IKEA dinner table set.
That said, since then I found that actually finding good stuff isn't always easy.
What's more, actually selling stuff is often such a time consuming hassle (posting, dealing with replies, scheduling pick ups, dealing with flakes) that in a lot of cases you're better off just paying trash hauling service to just come pick it all up in a single go.
However, monitors seem to sell immediately every time.
It's actually illegal to sell a used mattress in the US - and there are very legitimate public health reasons for the being the case. You can't really clean one - that's especially true of foam, and they can be riddled with lice, bedbugs, and all kinds of creepy crawlies.
I suppose there’s an interesting survivorship thing going on here. A poorly-built couch probably won’t even last 10 years. And if it does, somehow, you’ll know as soon as you sit on it if it’s about to turn into dust based on the squeaking and general instability. If it still feels solid and you don’t sink into it so deep that you can’t stand up again there’s a decent chance it’ll last another 10 years.
Custom Macy's extra long couch from ~2000 is the best thing ever. You sink into it and it holds up. Bought used-new for $1k when a friend paid $4k but was delivered 2 by mistake.
Interesting, with cats it's exactly the opposite.
And nowadays something expensive is no longer guaranteed to last.
This is why I value old things so much:
I have an old chair to work with, it's not a good chair, but it's better than anything new. I did a restoration instead of buying a new one because the new one might not last long.
I have a 10 year old car, I'm scared to buy a new one with the bizarre stories about new 3 cylinder engines breaking (throwaway engines?)
I try to use old things as much as possible. I stopped using an old Android when SSL stopped working. It's not a matter of lack of money, it's a lack of confidence in new things.
The last brand that I gave some value to was Sansumg. My last cell phone... THEY FORGOT to add a piece to fix the flat cable for the on/off button. And twice the on/off button stopped working, and twice I sent it to technical assistance. The third time I opened the phone and repaired the button myself. My two Sansumg TVs break a few days after the warranty ends.
My sofa broke in less than two years.
It's all too easy to see the past through rose tinted glasses. Also remember that the "built to last" stuff from the past is often an example of survivorship bias.
You know, like Apple does.
Did you use tube radios? They broke all the time.
The difference is that they weren't intentionally horrible, they were limitations of an era.
But at some point, devices start to last a long time. My parents' first refrigerator ran without problems for over 10 years. I've had far fewer problems with CDS and CD players than with cassette players.
And we used to have a lot of low quality items, but now it's much harder to find good quality items. And brand means almost nothing. Even Apple has been selling notebooks with horrible keyboards for years. I'm just using an Apple Notebook now, I've been waiting for years for them to change the keyboard.... The Nitendo Switch Joystick has a drift problem and Nintendo ignores it...
There is no reason for a new Samsung TV to break after a year of use. Or LEDs. Or power switches. It's not a technical limitation, it's a choice.
The quality of everything is trash. And if you want something that has the type of quality you used to get 30 years ago - you're going to pay close to 4-10x as much.
Everyone is selling trash for cheap. We live in a mall of garbage.
Only buy CRI 95+ (99 if you can find them). Not because of the color rendering quality (although that is a great benefit), but because they will tend to have appropriately derated other parts of the circuit, which are the elements that fail. They can do this for that product because at the more upmarket price, they can afford the additional 0.02 in COGS.
As to Nokia phones, well yeah. I understand there is a real market for them now, since they found they are very effective black box flight recorders.
Nokia phones weren't as durable as you remember. A Nokia phone would hardy last 2 years with limited use, either the battery or power connector would die quickly. iPhones get way more usage than Nokias and they easily last 3 years.
Also I've literally never had a LED bulb die on me.
I will have to upgrade soon to a 4G version because the 3G bands are getting repurposed in the UK over the next few years. Otherwise I would have kept going with it. Thankfully HMD still make the ones that run the S3 OS... which is immediately obvious when they actually bother quoting standby time in the specs; the KaiOS ones are basically just a worse android phone with all the same power drain issues and not enough compute or utility to justify it.
still are as so many see to be purchased and then running the ground for short term profits
When these conversations happens, I always wonder why people want some of these items to last forever.
Are you going to stick with that 10 year old plasma TV? Great. I want new tech, and this stuff moves fast. Furniture is a bit different, but my parents had all kinds of good, long-lasting stuff that no one wants because it's out of style.
Our cheap ikea couch keeps lasting, preventing us from buying a nice, new one. We can't throw it out of it's not broken.
It is long known that companies who sell good quality products go out of business after a couple decades at most, they saturate their market and because no one needs to renew, the company dies.
Ironically ikea HAS to sell quality (for price) because they are such a big brand. Their stuff is great quality for price, so people keep coming back for upgrades, when they can afford it.
My friend had a NEW Ford that went to the workshop more than 10 times in the first year of use. It's about trust that I will turn on the device and it will work.
> I want new tech
Buy it. I met people who sold their old iPhone and bought a new model every year, nothing against that. My problem is if the IPhone in this first year broke two or more times like my Sansumg.
Absolutely. It cost me the price of a power supply repair. The display is beautiful and the interface is crapware free.
> I want new tech, and this stuff moves fast.
True! Advertising tech is ever evolving.
That is very surprising. Mind explaining what the issues were?
I have bought many (6) smartphones and non has broken during my usage and also after I passed them to others.
We have 4th TV at home and each one was fully working when we replaced it after ~ 10 years. Current one (Sony), our first LCD is from 2012 and works perfectly (with just new set top box).
I have bought/got many laptops and any of them has broken. I have laptop from 1996 or 1998 which still works. There were software issues there, but they are fixable by update. (I have never bought Acer or Asus though)
Sure there is. I bought a case of Sylvania LEDs in 2019. They're used a few hours a week and I've tossed 5 of the 15 I've installed.
But, they cost £3 each and leaving them running 24/7 will cost you less than £20/year.
EDIT: Actually, in general I've found that my IKEA furniture has done pretty well (basically everything in the house is IKEA) with the sole exception of a "Lack" coffee table, whose surface is kinda disintegrating after 8 years (I think it's basically made of cardboard with a veneer...). The name should perhaps have been a warning.
I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
That said, I am one of those people who doesn't get a lot from them so I can speak to some of criticism. Part of it is just the aesthetic, and theirs doesn't match how I decorate my own space or what I usually feel good around. That's just the nature of aesthetics, though, and there's always going to be some difference in taste between any two people and any two regions.
As for quality, though, I think the critique you hear reflects the quality of their budget products. If you're eyeing modern or euro designs at a fancy furniture studio and then go to IKEA to find a cheap approximation, you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
That shouldn't rally be a surprise (cheap is cheap for a reason) and doesn't hold true for their mid-range and higher products. And heck, it's not even really fair when Walmart and Target furniture isn't any better, but it's enough to keep feeding the reputation.
Price is sometimes an indicator (I bought two Ikea dressers ~15 years ago; I kept the cheaper one for only a few years while the more expensive one is still going strong) but not always (my 18-year-old sofa was the entry-level option at the time).
I grew up in a nearly all Ikea household, and it’s only later in life I have discovered their reputation.
Am I missing something?
But depreciation on IKEA is huge because while it can last a long time within a household, it moves very poorly so if it has been moved or reassembled once or twice, it’s likely near end of life. But hard to evaluate that, it’s not like it has an odometer — hence value for used it very low.
It's probably a signaling thing too...
With the exception of the aforementioned table (which I think cost about 8 euro at the time, so, really, what did I expect) I’ve found all their stuff to be of very decent quality, certainly better than what you could get from ‘traditional’ furniture stores at the same price.
They have a line of pine furniture I like, as well as other things that are solid for the price (their kitchen cabinets) but you only have one chance to make a first impression as they say.
I had an engineered wood bed frame from them split in half, whereas an older IKEA pine (not hardwood but whatever) bed frame still lives on.
Also the style does get really old pretty fast for me.
I think good second hand furniture is where it's at: you get to not buy yet another new thing and get something solid and good.
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I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.
Yes I hate them.
You'd spend $60 on a book case and spend the next 4 hours trying to understand what the instructions mean and how to build it. You also needed a partner to hold corners together.
Now today, the furniture instructions are better and instead 16 different weird fastener, there are 8.
Its a frustration thing. Ikea didn't really do anything but be low cost. We blame Ikea like we blame Walmart for having drug addicts.
Every time I've moved, I think this will be the time I replace it, but the joinery has stayed rock-solid, the wood has aged beautifully (though I admit this is likely owing to a lack of pets or children) and even the upholstery has never pilled or visibly worn (though I keep thinking about ordering a replacement slipcover set from Comfort Works, which makes aftermarket upgrades for long-since-discontinued Ikea products). And the minimalist, Danish-influenced style somehow never looks out of place no matter what else I put around it.
This article has me thinking I may yet keep the Lillberg for years to come.
I don't think "cheap" construction is necessarily a bad thing, honestly. There's ways to do cheap construction such that it works just fine.
So while the materials are cheap and the style not high end, from what I've seen they maximize the engineering to make it durable.
[0] https://blog.prusa3d.com/mmu2s-printer-enclosure_30215/
Though I'm also going to point out that a LACK side table ($13 now) for 8 years is a rather good deal.
The internals are revealed on the Ikea page too: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lack-side-table-black-brown-801...
Okay those cheap ones make sense, but for coffee table it is robbery...
Also… I haven’t priced out Lack tables in a while but it looks like they’re still only $20?! I last bought one in probably 2006 and they were $20CAD at the time.
I still own some Billies made in 1995 or so by Ikea. Literally massive wood and damn good book shelves. The ones bought by me in 2008 or so very noticeably less well build but still ok. The ones we bought in 2018 or so are shit, especially the shelves are so thin that they begin to sag.
In 2008 or so a friend of mine bought a "kallax" (another name then) and it was awesome, it's still in his basement and looks good. We bought one in 2023 and it's basically only paint, some "wood" and air. It's ok to store stuff in, but it's impossible to drill a screw into the wood. It's like trying to screw paper.
You can drill the thin wood in IKEA furniture like this, but you have to reinforce it.
IKEA has always had a mix of wobbly instacrap and solid stuff. I remember they made a short-lived modular shelf called BRODER [1], which was solid steel and came in wall-mounted or freestanding configurations, the kind of solid thing you want in a garage or storage space. I was shocked at how high-end it was. It was discontinued to cost and low sales.
[1] https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3209/3641557199_eb0860e9eb.jpg
At some point in my twenties, I decided it was time to upgrade from my broke college student IKEA lifestyle which to me meant West Elm. Every thing I got from West Elm was absolute garbage and none of it lasted more than a handful of years.
Now I'm in the prime of my career and could move up to something actually nice if I really wanted to, like Design Within Reach (truly the most ironic business name in existence). But it's just so hard for me to justify a 5x or more price jump, when, honestly, the IKEA furniture I have has been so good.
I have a decade-old IKEA couch that is still in great shape despite surviving cats, dogs, young children, a snoring spouse who slept on it every night for about a year, and being mostly occupied throughout the entire pandemic. It's a tank, and still looks good to me.
I think I've committed myself to having a style that is basically "IKEA + some vintage stuff" which seems to work well quality wise and is about an order of magnitude cheaper than getting new quality non-IKEA furniture.
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It's not as well made as quality pieces, but I worked from the assumption that any couch I bought would be trash. Some of the nice things about a buying into a system like the Finnala are that when an arm, cushion, cover, or whatever fails, I can just replace that piece; there are aftermarket covers and legs; if I move it can be disassembled; and if a new place is smaller, the whole thing doesn't have to be trashed.
I love quality furniture, but it doesn't always fit the bill for a society where people can't afford a single family house or put down roots. (Note: that still doesn't necessarily justify all the items being sold today that are destined for a landfill in a few years.)
My coffee table is still from IKEA, but it’s metal. I’ve had it for 11 years now. It’s on wheels and some of them look like they’ve seen some stress over the years… and it’s been moved to 8 homes in those 11 years, which could have been the cause. But it still works great and I don’t know the the average person visiting my home would notice that.
I have been thinking of getting something a little larger and more grown up, but I love the functionality of the wheels, how it can get out of the way, and that I don’t have to baby it. It doesn’t look like they sell it anymore, but it was $40 well spent.
IKEA has also however gone downhill compared to ~10 years ago, however. A Poang today, compared to 10 years ago: does not have beveled edges on the wood (which makes it look cheaper and feel less 'soft'), and is even slightly narrower, so that the old cushions dont really fit in the new one.
I think we are seing the effect of increasing prices and breakdown of global supply chains there
Why are so many of them just plain uncomfortable? I'm looking for one I want right now, and I have to go around a furniture shop and try each out and I reckon, maybe 1/4 of them are suitable for a place you might enjoy sitting in.
The high end furniture shops seem to be the worst, i've seen 4 figure sofas that are the most uncomfortable thing I ever tried. Champions of form over function.
My last favourite sofa was around 2500 I guess, lasted 10 years, was excellently comfortable, but was unfortunately the wrong shape for my new place, I have not found anything anywhere near as good as that one.
It may be my height, much furniture seems a little off to me, and it is hard in general for me to find things I'm happy with.
One hack you can perform on most sofas is to add some height to the rear legs using castors or wooden blocks or something. This tilts it forward a bit. Sitting back or reclining is fine in a dentist's chair because there's head support but it's no good on a sofa! There our head and spines need to be balanced.
Anyhow -- quality of materials and design are both important but the fact is that average bodily awareness is poor and this is a fundamental reason why our furniture is worse than it needs to be!
Sofas have many different functions.
The plush sofa you sink deep into for TV at the end of the day has a different function than the firm sofa your dinner guests sit on the front of while sipping cocktails, etc
Many of the sofas you were looking at were probably designed for a different function than you were seeking.
I sourced high-quality foam and wool upholstery fabric from Maharam and took those to one of the best upholsterers/furniture restorers in Los Angeles. They did a wonderful job and now I have a super-comfortable couch with many good childhood memories, that should last me another 25 years before I need to replace the cushions again.
Point being, get a classic old piece and restore it. It will last a lifetime.
Same goes for old wooden windows etc. that can last a hundred years or more if properly taken care of.
"Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work you can always hit them with it." — Boris 'The Blade' Yurinov
As for other pieces of furniture, e.g., cabinets and stuff, we bought them used from a place that combed estate sales in Denmark for furniture and sold it in the US. One attraction is that the old furniture is smaller, so it works in a smaller house.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a2/c9/50/a2c9506ff9f3d65541d5...
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZrMM8Wa1DuU/UkRPE9INzeI/AAAAAAAAC...
I wrote my original post in haste - the cost was for doing the couch and a matching chair (same side-profile, just narrower.)
I wonder, is it even possible it's solidly made despite being very light?