Wedding by Ikea

March 30, 2011 - 4:39 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Israeliness 

Ikea store (sorry no photos of the happy couple)

Haaretz has an article on how the entry of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea into the Israeli market has created a design revolution. While most of the piece delved into the business of Ikea and what Carmela Jacoby Wellek, head of the interior design department at the College of Management in Rishon Letzion, labeled the “democratization” of design, there was one tidbit that caught my eye: weddings by Ikea.

By that, I don’t mean a wedding decked out in Ikea furniture. Rather, a wedding staged at Ikea itself. OK, I go too far. But Asaf and Noa Miron did at least stage their wedding photographs at the Netanya branch of Ikea a few months before it burned down.

The two were snapped in the parking lot in front of the blue cube-shaped store, laying on beds in the bedroom section, and modeling the latest stainless steel appliances in the kitchen division.

Why did they do it? Are they Ikea addicts? Not really. “Yes, we shop there,” Asaf told Haaretz. “I don’t know if we have a lot, but it’s more than a little.”

That said, the photo session was more of a lark than a mission statement. “We thought it was an original idea (although) later we heard that other people had done it too,” Asaf said.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. When Ikea first opened, I took the family to the coast just to walk through. We ogled a plenty, but only bought a couple of kitchen mittens and some salad tongs.

And Ikea has fulfilled other social needs in Israel. Apparently, according to the article, religious singles in the vicinity of the store are using it as a neutral meeting space for first dates. That’s a lot cheaper than the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton. And think of the icebreaker opportunities. “Gee this bed feels a bit too firm, what do you think?” Or “Look at these lovely childrens bunk beds. And how many kids were you thinking of having?”

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Rebuilding Ikea

February 15, 2011 - 1:54 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Business, design, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

Both Rachel and David made their own comments about the Ikea fire in Netanya, but this cartoon commentary by The Wall, a self-proclaimed new media Tel Aviv advertising firm, really says it all.

First, the title: Natanya2011 How to Build Ikea Again; I’m not sure if the name Netanya was misspelled on purpose, as Israeli spelling in English — given that it’s not their first language — tends toward incorrections.


As for the rest of the piece: We have the obvious and necessary method of poking fun at Ikea instructions, as well as the obvious and necessary ways of poking fun at Israeli society. There are the four million wooden pegs, more than 2 million screws and just one Ikea Allen wrench. There are the 15 Solel Boneh trucks — Solel Boneh being one of the largest construction companies in Israel — the 40 Manofei Avi cranes, just your random crane company, the 1500 fire extinguishers, natch, and recognizable by the Arabic writing on their shirts and kaffiyehs on their heads, the 100 Arab construction workers necessary to rebuild the place, a comment on who does the building and construction in these parts.

By the way, it seems the fire was caused by a short circuit in the store’s electrical system. Plans are to rebuild within the year.

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Nostalgia Sunday – And then there was IKEA…

February 6, 2011 - 8:03 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Business, design, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, News, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture 

The tragedy of yesterday’s IKEA fire is compounded by the fact that it leaves us, the Israeli furniture-buying public, exposed to the elements of bad taste that previously dominated the local furniture scene. And when I say bad taste, I am being kind. I should really say “horribly bad taste”.

Who among us, on their first visit to Israel in the 60s and 70s — and even well into the 80s — was not impressed by the Scandinavian-style furniture that decorated many a living room? Except, it turns out that Danish modern wasn’t the people’s actual choice. It was the style foisted upon them by Socialism, in all its practicality.

Because most of the new country’s residents came to it with the shirt on their backs — quite literally in many cases — there was a need for functional and affordable furniture. This was manufactured by kibbutz industries like Shomrat HaZorea which was once the watchword in teak dining room / living room sets. In the late 80s, such items were dumped on the street to be collected by the local alte zachen rag n’ bone men. (You can now find those same pieces in high-end Tel Aviv boutiques selling refurbished mid-century modern).

In their stead: the black, red and chrome “Hi-Tec” look for the hipsters, along with futons for the crunchy granola set. (I had both).

Meanwhile the older generation finally fulfilled their desires for real antiques by purchasing fake ones. Really bad fake ones, the most obnoxious one being the “vitrina”, a glass-fronted cabinet for storing knick-knacks, bric-a-brac and other tschockes collected on the trips abroad that Israel’s middle class was finally able to afford.

It was a classic case, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe’s From Our House To Bauhaus, of the intelligentsia designing simple, clean-lined and functional workers residences only to discover that the actual inhabitants would immediately cover the walls with flocked velvet wallpaper, hang gold framed pictures of teary-eyed children, put plastic roses in pink glass vases on top of lace doilies and in general decorate with other commonly accepted signifiers of wealth.

But never, I must point out, at the expense of comfort! Some years ago, when I was on a journalists’ junket to the Natuzzi furniture factory in Italy (call it my Italian couch trip) one of the executives asked our group why it was that they always received orders from their Israeli distributor for a certain kind of chair; it wasn’t popular in any other country.

“What kind of chair is it?” I asked, already knowing the answer. He showed us a picture of a television recliner.

That’s right. Israelis love their La-Z-Boys, American Comforts and any other chair that lets you lay back, put your feet up after a long day and watch TV en famille. In fact, it’s better if you have two. Israelis also see nothing wrong with white plastic stackable Keter chairs in the dining room or the office (a good idea that somehow went wrong in the aesthetics department). Your ultimate kiddie bed? The “sapat noar” or youth sofa: bed by night, couch by day (if you can convince your kids to ever straighten up their beds). The ultimate adult bed? A double bed split in two, each with its own adjustable mattress and separate controllers — all the better to watch TV with.

In the 90s, knock-down DIY was already infiltrating Israel but you couldn’t get your hands on it. (My friend Debbie actually took the IKEA catalogue to a carpenter and had him build a bookshelf according to the picture on the cover). More outrageous was going shopping in areas known to have low-priced furniture like Tel Aviv’s Herzl Street, picking out something that had clearly come from a flat-pak and having to pay top dollar — or shekel — all the while having one’s ire placated with “Giveret, zeh firma”, which means something like “Lady, this comes from a very fine quality manufacturer”. If I could have afforded fine quality, would I be shopping on Herzl Street?

No, I would have been at Tollman’s, I-D Design, Castiel or the local outlet of Habitat. Because fine furniture was also coming in, sold to the petit bourgeoisie by other members of the petit bourgeoisie. It was pricey and their importers wanted to keep it that way. Which is why they tried sway public opinion away from IKEA by giving interviews praising themselves and denigrating quality of the Swedish company’s wares.

And weren’t they surprised when IKEA finally opened its doors and didn’t fail. Israelis became adept at wielding the Allen wrench, assembling Billys, Rakkes and Malms, redoing their rooms and refinishing their kitchens. Because IKEA is the Bauhaus ideal incarnate: reasonably priced, nice-looking, well-designed, functional goods for the working middle-class that can be used and then, when the time comes, easily dispensed with and replaced by new ones.

Thank the good heavens that the smear campaign launched against IKEA by the Israel Furniture Industries Association also didn’t succeed. A second IKEA branch opened last year in Rishon Lezion (and you can’t convince me there isn’t a connection between the repeated attempts to block Rishon’s municipality from zoning the store and the location of the Israel Furniture Center, the IFIA’s ill-appointed so-called showcase in the Rishon Lezion western industrial zone).

So we’ll be Rishon-bound for the next six months to a year, which is how long it will take ’til the Netanya store reopens and all will be right in the world.

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Ikea in Rishon

March 23, 2009 - 8:38 PM by · 4 Comments
Filed under: Business, design, General 

ikea-rishonThe Ikea franchise in Israel has won a major or minor victory, depending on how you look at it. After three years of a heated legal battle between the Ikea franchise owners in Israel and more than 200 furniture purveyors in Rishon Lezion — Israel’s fourth-largest city — a second branch of the Swedish furniture chain will be built in the seaside city of Rishon, but without an adjacent shopping center, which was what the city’s storeowners had feared.

According to the Ha’aretz account of the settlement, the furniture store owners are less fearful of the Ikea branch itself, and more nervous about the planned 30,000-square-meter shopping center that was supposed to accompany the 323,000 square-meter Ikea. Personally, I’m surprised they’re not more nervous about Ikea; the Netanya store is one of the chain’s most successful ever, with more than 16 million visitors since it opened eight years ago.

Rishon, in case you didn’t know, has become something of a shopping destination. I was somewhat aware of this, but became more aware last week when my sister and I took an outing in order to shop at the city’s branch of Eden Teva Market, without having to schlep out to Netanya. Yes, I know, it may seem strange to head all the way to Rishon from Jerusalem (about a 45-minute drive, longer, if you don’t have good directions) for food shopping. But when the store in question is Israel’s answer to Whole Foods, some of us travel far and wide.

And now, it seems, we won’t have to head as far as Netanya any longer for our Billy bookshelves and Poang armchairs. As for those in northern Israel, it seems there are plans to open a third store in the Galilee within three years. So thanks to all the Rishon Lezion furniture store owners and to Ikea Israel for settling; now I’ll have an additional stop to make in Rishon when I head out there for sulphur-free dried fruits, spelt breads and other natural goodies.

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